10 10 In January 1921, Mother Jones traveled to Mexico with Fred Mooney, secretary of UMW District 17, West Virginia. Mooney described their approach to Mexico City: “When I looked out, there was a string of taxi cabs blocking the railroad tracks. About 40 strikers from a jewelry factory had motored out to meet ‘Madre Yones.’ … They threw crimson carnations and blue violets around Mother until only her head and shoulders could be seen.” Mexicans actually called her Madre Juanita, but her arrival was indeed a triumph.1
She was there to address the third conference of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. The group was a new one, created to forge stronger bonds between Western Hemisphere unions. Mother Jones came as an honored guest of the Mexican government. Her work on behalf of the revoltosos, her talks with the martyred President Francisco Madero in 1911, her praise for Pancho Villa, all made her a very visible American supporter of the Mexican Revolution. Antonio Villarreal, one of the revoltosos whom she helped free from an American prison, was now Secretary of Agriculture under the new reform government of Álvaro Obregón, who pledged to carry out a strongly pro-labor agenda. A villa with servants and a car and driver were put at her disposal, and she attended receptions given by President Obregón and by the American ambassador.2
Mother Jones probably made Samuel Gompers, head of the American delegation, a little nervous. She told a reporter for El Heraldo that Mexico “is the only country in the world where real liberty may be enjoyed.” She praised the Russian Revolution, and added that American capitalists were quaking in their scab-made shoes. She spent much of her time with leading Mexican Socialists, including Roberto Haberman, an American émigré, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, an agrarian leader from the Yucatan and follower of Emiliano Zapata, and Luis Morones, Mexico’s minister of industry.3
Mother Jones was one of the featured speakers at the conference. She called the convention “the greatest event in history,” because it marked a new level of international solidarity (but also, one suspects, because she was an honored guest). She stressed unity: “It is a great age; it is a great time to live in. Some people call us Bolsheviks, some call us I.W.W.’s, some call us Reds. Well, what of it! If we are Red, then Jefferson was Red, and a whole lot of those people who turned the world upside down were Red.” Only “the soul of unrest” and “the spirit of dissent” mattered. But her friends must have been concerned, maybe saddened, as they listened. The sharp wit, the telling stories, the over-the-top style were missing. Now when she mentioned her imminent demise—“My days are closing in”—there was a disturbing ring of truth.4
Despite Mother Jones’s extravagant claims for the importance of the Mexico City conference, the Pan-American Federation proved a disappointment. Members voted to condemn the American invasions of the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua; they also denounced the persecution of U.S. radicals under the Espionage Act. But many Latin American countries failed to participate at all, and the presence of Samuel Gompers and other AFL leaders made the Federation seem a showcase for American business unionism. Indeed, the U.S. government backed the proceedings, hoping that the PAFL would encourage craft rather than industrial unions in Mexico, and thereby facilitate the orderly expansion of markets between the two countries. Participants backed important reforms like the eight-hour day and an end to child labor, but the conservatives always held sway. The organization survived only a decade.5
Still, the conference was a high moment in Mother Jones’s life. It affirmed her status as an elder of the labor movement with an international reputation. Perhaps because she felt her influence in the United States slipping away, the accolades of Mexico City flattered her, and she returned home in mid-April 1921 with thoughts of emigrating to Mexico. Later that spring, when she made another visit, Mexican officials rolled out the red carpet once again. Roberto Haberman, the founder of the Federación de Trabajadores de México, wrote her, “General Villarreal has a house ready for you, and a prettier place cannot be imagined. Also servants, and an automobile.”6
She toured widely, even went to the Yucatán for a Socialist convention in the industrial city of Orizaba. When John Fitzpatrick and Ed Nockles of the Chicago Federation of Labor wrote on May 1 to wish her a happy birthday, her return letter painted Mexico in the brightest colors. She described the ceremonies in Orizaba: “It was the most remarkable meeting I addressed in years.… The town was thoroughly organized, and the spirit they possessed was an inspiration. One got new hope for the future.” A union band played, there were no police, and the event occurred in the workers’ own municipal building. Most remarkable of all, a flag representing the Haymarket martyrs of 1886 was carried in alongside the Mexican national flag. “Everyone of you would have been put in jail for the next ten years if that occurred in Chicago,” she wrote, but in Orizaba, “the tribute paid to that banner as it entered the hall was the most remarkable demonstration I had witnessed in all my years in the industrial conflict.”7
It was an absurdly romanticized vision, one that grew at least in part out of a need to feel that her decades of work would not be washed away. “After all,” she wrote Fitzpatrick and Nockles, “one’s life is not in vain when they witness the beautiful conception of industrial freedom that is taking possession of the souls of the workers.” As America slipped into the retrograde 1920s, as reactionaries smashed the radical dreams of the previous three decades, Mother Jones found momentary comfort in Mexico. During her last decade, she vacillated between hope and despair. It was a sign not only of a world gone sour but of her own aging and, with it, a need to take stock of her life.8
Her gaudy image of Mexico had faded by the end of her stay. She described how this fledgling social democracy was threatened by a cadre of communist “freaks” who “want to rule and dictate,” and she feared the day when “those fanatics should ever get to the helm.” Equally daunting was a right-wing Christian reaction against the left, for it threatened Mexico with religious zealotry. She wrote John Walker that a whole congregation in Morelia, whipped to a frenzy by some “sky pilot’s” sermon, stoned the offices of a socialist newspaper. Meanwhile, the “oil pirates”—American firms, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil prime among them—continued bleeding the country. At the end of May, just before returning home, she concluded a letter to Walker by saying that “things are not just as bright here as I would like to see them,” and she added that illness plagued her: “I have not been well John …; I have had rheumatism so much, and it is kind of playing on me.”9
Mother Jones’s last decade began with her on the road as usual, and not just in Mexico. In February 1920, she shared a stage with Jane Addams and John Fitzpatrick as ten thousand people attended the “All Chicago Liberty Demonstration Protesting against Raids, Deportations, and Other Infringements of American Civil Liberties.” In March, she spoke before San Francisco’s striking shipyard workers. That same month, she had the distinction of being one of several dozen radicals—including Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, “Nicholas Lenine,” John Reed, Karl Marx, Tom Mooney, and Leon Trotsky—whose names and photographs appeared on a memo circulated within the War Department. By April, she had made headquarters at the UMW Building in Charleston, West Virginia, where a new round of strikes was just heating up and where she described herself as “still at the front, fighting the battle of the workers.”10
But all was not well. One reason she left Chicago for California during the winter of 1920 was to ease an attack of rheumatism, the disease that progressively crippled her over the next decade. Her letters reveal a recurring pattern of illness. “I took sick on the train going to Washington,” she wrote John Walker in June 1920, and so she canceled her speaking engagement in southern Illinois. A month later, she wrote him, “My strength is failing, John, I don’t feel able to do the work I did.… I put in some very strenuous years for the last ten years, it has not been easy sailing for me.” A series of unnamed maladies plagued her, often sending her to friends’ homes or to the hospital. Aside from the trips to California, which grew longer and more frequent with rheumatism’s advancing pain, she spent decreasing numbers of days on the road, more with friends in Washington and Chicago.11
For someone who boasted that her home was like her shoes, going with her wherever she went, her declining vigor and growing immobility must have been terribly frightening, made worse by never knowing when the pain and paralysis would strike. The kindness of friends helped her through. Terence Powderly wrote her in April 1921, “I ask you to always bear in mind that there is only one Mother Jones. I doubt if the world has seen her like before and while I hope for the future, [I] sadly feel the world will not see her like again. Be careful then of her health, remember that the covering of the soul you carry is frail, that time has not dealt too kindly with it and every precaution of yours should be taken to guard it carefully and well.” When she became gravely ill in September 1922, Powderly and his wife, Emma, took her in and nursed her back to health. Newspapers across the country reported her condition, and letters poured in from friends, from union locals, and from people she had never met. Over the next five years, Mother Jones spent so much time at the Powderlys’ house that she began referring to it as “home.” But she never quite found peace in rest, always wishing to be out organizing.12
A disturbing disjointedness reappeared in some of her speeches and letters. A fine address, such as the one she gave on June 20, 1920, in Williamson, West Virginia—in the heart of the violent coal counties bordering Kentucky—was followed days later by speeches with many of the same themes and stories, but now told cryptically, almost incoherently. And as Mother Jones grew weaker, her adversaries grew stronger. The early 1920s were lean times for the American left. Postwar repression continued, and, equally important, the economy cooled, resulting in rising unemployment.13
Mother Jones remained upbeat in her speeches, but her letters revealed growing pessimism. To John Walker, she wrote that over 130,000 Americans were incarcerated, that this was a powerful indictment of American society, that sometimes she got so discouraged she just wanted to give up the fight for justice. To the journalist Ryan Walker she noted the grim news that the New York legislature expelled five duly elected state representatives for being members of the Socialist Party: “If they can do [that], … then farewell to Liberty in America, there is very little of it left anyhow.” To Theodore Debs, she wrote of her pain at his brother Eugene’s incarceration in Atlanta under the Sedition Act, and at Christmas, she futilely begged Woodrow Wilson for Debs’s pardon and release. She spent more and more of her time writing, petitioning, pleading for the release of political prisoners.14
As always, nothing perked up Mother Jones more than a good fight, and a big one was brewing in West Virginia. At the end of World War I, three-quarters of a million men mined coal in America, and over half of them belonged to the United Mine Workers. Demand for coal dropped precipitously with the end of the war, falling prices made organizing much more difficult, and rich new coal lands in southern West Virginia threatened the union in the old fields. The owners of these thick veins of coal intended to keep the UMW out. In Logan County, operators kept Sheriff Don Chafin in power, and he ran a brutal regime of terror against union organizers. But the UMW was equally determined to win this new territory. Beginning with the early efforts in 1902 and culminating with the drives of World War I, the union had organized roughly sixty thousand miners in the Kanawha, New River, and Fairmont fields. The UMW now had a real chance to capture the entire state, and West Virginia was the key to organizing the whole American coal-mining industry.15
Wildcat strikes rolled across the region in 1919. District 17 president Frank Keeney and secretary Fred Mooney asked the men to honor their contracts, but they disciplined no one who walked out. Nothing, however, matched the raw violence and abrogation of constitutional liberties in Logan, Mingo, and McDowell Counties or the reaction of the miners to the attack on their rights. The union sent in organizers and formed new locals; guards escalated the violence to stop the drive; miners armed themselves once again. In the spring of 1920, Keeney asked the operators for a collective bargaining agreement. They refused, locked out and evicted union miners, paid bonuses to non-union men, and brought in more guards. The union officially called a strike, and the cycle of burnings, explosions, ambushes, beatings, and killings accelerated.16
On May 19, 1920, thirteen Baldwin-Felts guards, led by Albert and Lee Felts, two of the three brothers who ran the company, went to the town of Matewan to evict families. Sheriff Sid Hatfield (a former miner and UMW member), Mayor Cabell C. Testerman, and several armed miners confronted the detectives and questioned their right to carry out the evictions. Words grew heated; guns were drawn. It remains unclear who fired first, but when the shooting ended, eleven had perished, including both Felts brothers, five detectives, Mayor Testerman, and two miners. During the next year, West Virginia governors John J. Cornwell then Ephraim Morgan declared martial law three times, and twice the U.S. infantry took over for the inadequate state troops. This would be West Virginia’s bloodiest time yet.17
Mother Jones traveled through the southern counties in 1920–1921, though her role seems to have been confined to occasional speech making. John L. Lewis kept her on the UMW payroll, but their relationship was strained. He demanded complete loyalty from his subordinates, something she refused to give those she respected, much less men she reviled. Moreover, Lewis did not like having women on the staff. Mother Jones privately mocked him, especially for his overbearing manner and naked ambition. Many of her friends, John Walker prime among them, lost jobs to the Lewis juggernaut, and she barely contained her anger at his autocratic rule. When Lewis called off a national coal strike scheduled for November 1919 under pressure from the federal government, it merely confirmed her opinion that he was spineless and out for himself.18
Mother Jones could still rise to the occasion for a big speech. In the town of Williamson, in the heart of Mingo County, she told her listeners that World War I profiteering created one new millionaire for every three thousand dead Americans; she fulminated against the recent deportations of five thousand dissidents under the Sedition Act; she observed that the labor movement was rising all over the world—in Portugal, in Ireland, in Central Europe, even in England, where dock-workers refused to load munitions to fight the Bolsheviks in the East. Unionism, she declared, was Americanism: “Before I would be a lap-dog for those steel robbers … I would stand like an American under the flag as the revolutionists did before.” She rejected the renewed racism that was sweeping the nation and its labor unions, told the men that divisions between black and white miners merely played into the operators’ hands, and warned journalists not to stir such dissensions. Above all, she showed the old fire: “I want to say to the robbers of Logan that Mother Jones is going in.… We are going to clean up West Virginia. We are going to put her on the map.… I am not going to take any guns. I am going in there with the American flag; that is my banner, and no rotten robber or gunman can meddle with me, because I will just raise Hell with him.”19
Mother Jones stayed mostly in Charleston, West Virginia, from mid-1920 through the fall of 1921. Ill health slowed her down, “but the boys are good to me,” she reported to Walker. “They don’t overwork me, the fact of the matter is they let me come and go as I want to.” Perhaps the boys failed to work her very hard because they were just as happy without her. Indeed, a few letters went out from UMW locals asking the national office to remove Mother Jones. The reasons are not entirely clear. Bitter feelings still lingered from her efforts to discourage dissension within the union in 1916; clearly she was no longer so reliable as a speaker and organizer; one letter even accused her of doing Governor Morgan’s bidding, and, as we shall see, there is some evidence that this was true.20
An accusation also emerged that Mother Jones was being paid by the coal operators. Although the charge proved false, the Bureau of Investigation took it seriously enough to make inquiries. Union leaders often were accused of treachery by the operators and by their rivals inside organized labor. The evidence offered in this case was that Mother Jones seemed to have a lot of spending money (of course, the union gave her cash for expenses) and that sometimes she was so militant she must have been trying to get union activities blocked by court injunctions (others accused her of aiding the operators by being too cautious). Her rhetoric was inconsistent, partly out of ambivalence over this particular strike, partly because her mind was not as well focused as in earlier years.21
After a year of threats, shootings, and martial law, the tensions came to a crisis. As many as 90 percent of Mingo County’s miners were UMW members. The operators brought in trainloads of strikebreakers, along with more guards for protection; snipers shot at them. When state police were sent in to keep the mines open, UMW men shot them too. And then on August 1, 1921, more than a year after Matewan, Sid Hatfield was ambushed and assassinated by Baldwin-Felts guards as he walked up the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse. Rage boiled over in the mining camps. Hatfield was a local hero, and his murder symbolized the operators’ arrogance.22
A week after Hatfield’s murder, Mother Jones led a thousand miners to Charleston to petition Governor Morgan for a settlement; he refused. Next, the state supreme court upheld the legality of martial law and declined to release jailed UMW officials. Meanwhile, stories of new atrocities by the guards and deputies leaked out of Logan and Mingo. On August 20, armed miners began pouring into a town called Marmet on Lens Creek, about ten miles south of Charleston. Thousands gathered, a “citizens army,” some of them wearing their uniforms from the Great War. They declared they would march through Logan County, hang Don Chafin, move into Mingo County, end martial law, and free their imprisoned brothers. Five to seven thousand men—the total reached perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand a few days later—assembled to hear their leaders on August 24. Mother Jones addressed them at the height of their fury.23
She had mostly taken a militant tone in the weeks before Hatfield’s death, but since that event, her words had grown more moderate. There is no extant copy of her speech at Marmet. In the days before the men gathered, she had visited Mingo County, observed martial law there, and spoken to some of the imprisoned miners. Maybe she feared a bloodbath, feared that her boys would be decimated by superior forces, especially since the U.S. Army surely would intervene. We know that she corresponded with Governor Morgan, who tried to convince her that turning back the miners was the only way of avoiding massive bloodshed. Apparently, he persuaded her. To the miners’ astonishment on August 24, she told them they could not win, urged moderation, implored them to go home. More, she said that she had just received a telegram from Warren Harding. “I request,” she quoted the President, “that you abandon your purpose and return to your homes, and I assure you that my good offices will be used to forever eliminate the gunman system from the state of West Virginia.”24
District leaders Keeney and Mooney were incredulous. They asked to see the telegram; Mother Jones refused. They suggested it was fake; she told them to go to hell. The miners were confused, their leadership divided. Many prepared to return home. Keeney and Mooney drove to Charleston, called the White House, and came back with the news: Warren Harding’s secretary said that the President had sent no message to Mother Jones. Keeney issued a statement calling the telegram bogus and denying reports that the miners had voted to return home. Indeed, within a day or two, seven or eight thousand men were marching toward Logan County with the password “On to Mingo.” Words like “sellout” and “traitor” crossed men’s lips as they marched.25
Over the next few days, the miners were joined by thousands more men. They commandeered food and supplies and even hijacked trains on their way to Mingo. Union locals shipped guns and ammunition. The Secretary of War dispatched to the scene General Harry Bandholz, who warned the local UMW leadership to turn back the march or be prosecuted for treason. They followed his orders, and some of the men began to withdraw. But when word came that Chafin had attacked and killed a group of UMW men, the miners moved in force again toward Logan, where they engaged Chafin’s army in the largest battle on American soil since the Civil War.26
The Battle of Blair Mountain, as it is known in Appalachian lore, lasted for three days at the end of August. Thousands of armed men fought a continuous campaign, much of it guerrilla-style in thick summer vegetation. The defenders had machine guns; their command was unified; they dropped homemade bombs from airplanes. The miners’ equipment was less sophisticated, their ranks disorganized, but they had at least twice as many men. Behind the lines, women cooked meals, nursed the wounded, brought up supplies. The number of casualties is unknown, but one witness claimed that a million rounds of ammunition were fired. Fighting raged until September 1, when President Harding issued a proclamation ordering all insurgents to cease fire and retire to their homes. The miners were unwilling to fight against American troops, so when the Army finally arrived—the Eighty-eighth Light Bombing Squadron, a chemical warfare unit, and two thousand infantrymen armed with trench mortars—they quietly surrendered their weapons and went home.27
The UMW men more than held their own, but the Battle of Blair Mountain was a crushing defeat for the union. Fighting now in the courts, the mine owners tarred the union with the brush of treason. In Boone County, where the march originated, the grand jury indicted over three hundred individuals; in Logan County, the number reached nine hundred, and the charges included insurrection and murder. The operators supplied legal assistance to prosecutors, who made sure all of the leaders were arrested. Eventually, most of the charges were dismissed, but the legal battles did not end until 1924 and not before union treasuries were drained and morale sucked dry. By the end of the 1920s, non-union coal from the southern counties had virtually driven the UMW from West Virginia.28
What do we make of Mother Jones’s role in these events? She never explained herself. Her autobiography is silent and her private correspondence says little of substance. The simplest interpretation is that she feared the miners were walking into a trap, that they could not win this fight, that marching against state and federal troops would be seen as treason. It was a perfectly reasonable position. By encouraging the men to go home, she only did what Mooney and Keeney were forced to do two days later. Perhaps she was thinking back thirty years to Eugene Debs’s arrest during the Pullman strike, when his American Railway Union resisted the federal government and was crushed as a result. Moreover, her behavior was consistent; she had often talked the militant line before, pushed it as far as she dared for strategic purposes, then backed down. If that was the case now, she read the situation accurately: armed miners could not win a battle against the U.S. Army, but trying, they surely would destroy their union. Viewed this way, her shock at Keeney’s and Mooney’s “betrayal” made sense; insurrection was suicide, the march must be turned back.29
But it was not that simple. The fake telegram was deeply condescending to the miners. Coming from someone whose lifework was educating and empowering workers, this cheap ruse was offensive in its presumption that Mother Jones’s “boys” could be so easily manipulated. Worse, it proceeded from the arrogant conceit that “Mother knows best,” that distorting the truth was acceptable because she alone was wise enough to guide the movement. As Mother Jones, she felt justified in imposing a parent’s will on her children. The tension between industrial democracy and family authority was clear; her goal was the former, but she took her influence, her very identity from the latter.30
Family authority betrayed her in another way. Mother Jones had always been attracted to powerful men. She engaged in a sort of game with them, matching their authority against her own venerable motherhood. Thus, as a woman, she gained a rough and temporary equality with men like Terence Powderly, John Mitchell, even John D. Rockefeller by making them into surrogate sons. Her persona commanded respect, but she never fully escaped her dependency on such men. She needed them around to challenge, persuade, and manipulate in order to assert her influence, for they were the ones with the power. She enjoyed that power, though always in indirect and unacknowledged ways, and because of this, her attitudes toward such men often were volatile. Governor Morgan was no friend of the UMW, yet Mother Jones convinced herself that he was labor’s man. As with young Rockefeller, she probably thought she was manipulating him, when clearly it worked the other way around. Five days after the fake telegram, as miners and troops fought pitched battles, she wrote Morgan a one-line telegram: “Can [I] be of any assistance in restoring order?” to which he responded, “Situation still tense May have to call on you Certainly appreciate your offer of assistance.” These telegrams were not public knowledge in 1921; if they had been, miners might well have spoken even more pointedly about treason and betrayal.31
After the strike was crushed, Mother Jones condemned the district leaders as inexperienced and not up to the job. To William Green, secretary-treasurer of the UMW, she wrote, “If the right man had been placed in charge of Mingo at the beginning of that strike, it could have been settled, and the hatred that has developed would not show its hand.” (Perhaps she wanted to say “the right woman” but could not.) No doubt she felt that Keeney and the others walked into the operators’ trap. And given how completely the UMW had been devastated in West Virginia by the end of the decade, she might have been right Mother Jones was deeply humiliated when Mooney and Keeney challenged her, then proved her a liar. The episode contributed to her becoming very sick, almost mortally ill, during the next year. To Governor Morgan, with whom she subsequently developed a friendship, she wrote at the end of 1921, “I have not been well Governor ever since I left. That shock was so sever[e] that I had a nervou[s] breakdown from it and a severe attack of rheumatism, and I have been here [with John Walker in Springfield, Illinois] under the care of a specialist physician for the last four weeks.”32
Despite her humiliation, she worked to get arrested miners freed from prison. She played her old games with Morgan, writing him with motherly discernment that youthful hotheadedness brought the state to the brink of war: “Those young fellows, void of any experience in the great industrial conflicts, were carried away thinking they could change the world over night. They will not be able to change it with guns and bullets. It has got to be done through practical, fundamental, patriotic education.” A few months later, Morgan wrote her that nearly all of those indicted in the Logan insurrection had been let go, and she urged him to pardon the remaining few.33
During their correspondence, Mother Jones hinted that it had been Morgan’s idea all along for her to tell the miners to turn back in August 1921: “Governor, I owe you a debt of gratitude that I don’t think I can ever compensate you for. If you had not sent me down to stop that day I would have been the victim of it all.… I have put up with more insults for the sake of the poor wretches that they might see a brighter day for their children.” Was the Harding telegram Morgan’s idea? She never said definitively. It was the height of self-delusion on Mother Jones’s part to think that Morgan was the miners’ friend, yet because they were mixed up in this together, to that delusion she clung: “In the twenty four years that I have been going in and out of West Virginia you are the one man I could approach for the sake of the poor helpless man who had been exploited and robbed.… I shall clear you before the world and for those who are going to come after us.… You saved me from destruction.” Clear him before the world? Saved her from destruction? Whatever Mother Jones meant, she no longer felt welcome in West Virginia; she returned only once.34
By late 1922, Mother Jones had constructed her own history of the insurrection, and everything was Mooney’s and Keeney’s fault. She wrote John Walker that their treatment—their betrayal—almost destroyed her: “They are dirty and treacherous a group of Vultures as could be found They would cut the throat of Jesus Christ to save themselves.” Her next few sentences were almost incoherent with rage:
Keeney gave me my Death blow I saved the lives of thousands of men Those Lap Dogs of Al Hamilton [an operator whom she and Walker suspected of paying off UMW officials in West Virginia] left nothing undone to crucify me Look at what they did to poor Howtt You know I helped to build up West Va I waded creeks to get meeting I faced machine guns I spent months in Military Prisson I was carried 84 miles in the night taken in to the Federal Court… Lewis never did that
She was quite ill when she wrote this letter. Still, her inability to structure, let alone punctuate, it and her confusion of people and issues—Alexander Howatt, Keeney, Lewis, Hamilton, the strikes of 1902, 1913, and 1921—testify to her hurt and to her tenuous grip on reality.35
Underneath it all was the fear that her work building the union in West Virginia was unraveling and, worse, that her reputation was ruined. “I am sick at heart, I am broken down,” she wrote William Green six months after the false telegram. She reached her nadir physically in the summer of 1922, spent a month near death at the Powderlys’ house, then finally pulled through. But she was never quite the same.36
By mid-1923, Mother Jones had regained enough strength for a bit of activism. In July, she addressed the Farmer-Labor Party, an organization that saw itself as a successor to the nearly defunct Socialist Party. Despite her skepticism about politics, she was impressed with recent social changes in Russia and Mexico. In the United States, even little improvements mattered, like getting judges appointed who would not cripple strikes with injunctions. She attended the Party convention in Chicago knowing that the bloc led by William Z. Foster was communist. Indeed, she voted against a resolution to expel the radicals and remained seated when her old friend John Fitzpatrick staged a walkout to protest the presence of those who would not disavow violent revolution. Mother Jones spoke up boldly for the new Party and insisted that everyone be allowed to participate, because “too long has labor been subservient to the old betrayers, politicians and crooked labor leaders.” She told the delegates that unity would allow them to clean up corruption and return to the spirit of America’s revolutionary fathers: “The producer, not the meek, shall inherit the earth,” she declared. “Not today perhaps, nor tomorrow, but over the rim of the years my old eyes can see the coming of another day.” That day, however, would be postponed one more time; within a year, the Farmer-Labor Party dissolved into warring factions.37
She could not sustain her commitment anyway. On top of illness, her alienation from the UMW leadership, and the state of American politics, money became a problem. Cut off from her small UMW salary, she grew anxious over finances, and she wrote William Green about it in October 1922. He allowed her to preserve her dignity: she sent a “bill”; he dipped into union coffers and sent her a check. Several times they repeated the exchange. She was dependent now in ways she never had been before. The new Internal Revenue Service questioned why she did not pay tax on more than two thousand dollars earned from the UMW in 1921 (the last year she was retained as an organizer). John Walker paid her taxes and fines—$72.50. She berated him in a letter, asking why the government harassed an elderly widow. Had she not lived on a fraction of her small stipend, used most of it for union expenses, and given away the rest to those in need? Why did the IRS not tax Rockefeller for the food she ate while confined to his bull pen in Colorado? Walker placated her.38
After the war, Mother Jones’s speeches often employed the metaphor of a man in a tower who can see lightning long before those on the ground know a storm is coming. She meant, of course, that experience allowed her to see further and deeper than others into the great social issues. But whatever magisterial view she might have once possessed, she was more cut off than she had ever been, and few paid attention to her. For thirty years, she had thrust herself into the midst of events, and now she was an outsider. It was time to turn inward and think about what her life had meant, time to tell her story, shape its meaning, and keep it alive for future generations.39
Father William Richard Harris passed away in Toronto on March 5, 1923, after a short bout with the flu. The obituary on the front page of the Globe praised his accomplishments as an orator and scholar. Born in Ireland, educated in the Toronto separate schools during the 1850s, he studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1870. Father Harris held a series of administrative and pastoral positions over the next thirty years, rising to dean of the diocese of St. Catherine’s. He also traveled through North and South America, Spain and Portugal, and with these experiences, wrote book after book on the Catholic Church in early Canada, on the archaeology of ancient North American civilizations, and on foreign lands and peoples—twelve books in all, widely reviewed, making him one of the most prolific writers in English-speaking Canada. The Globe concluded that Harris was among the best-known clerics in Ontario.40
Yet he was a very private individual. “Harris seldom spoke about his family or himself,” one of his biographers observed. “If the conversation turned on these topics he avoided a direct answer and in a humorous way made it clear that the subject should be changed.” Still, a bit of private history crept into his books. In The Catholic Church in the Niagara Peninsula, Harris wrote of the Great Hunger in Ireland and of the coffin ships and fever sheds of 1847: “Only an inspired writer may record the sufferings of the unhappy people when the dread scourge of ship-fever rioted among them. He alone may tell of the crushed hopes and ruined prospects of the full grown man, of the sorrows of the delicate Irish mother.” Harris himself was newly born when his father and elder brother left Ireland for Canada, was but a lad when he crossed the Atlantic with his mother and sisters a few years later.41
Harris’s first biographer mentioned rumors that the reverend was brother to Mary Harris Jones, but given her autobiography’s claim that her family emigrated in 1835, he rejected the possibility. The next chronicler of Harris’s life decided that they were half brother and sister. Of course William and Mary were full siblings. She was nine years older than he, and no doubt had spent considerable time taking care of him in Cork and Toronto. Yet as adults, they ignored each other. Mother Jones mentioned William briefly in newspaper interviews at the turn of the century, noted that he wanted her to live with him in Toronto, but added that she rejected his offer in favor of a life of activism. After that, she stopped talking about him. There is no record of correspondence between them, and apparently neither spoke of the other. What kept them apart? Was it his devotion to the faith and her scoffing at it? Maybe her life as an independent woman, or perhaps her radical politics, offended him. Whatever the cause, their estrangement was deep; William’s last will and testament named a sister and niece but not Mary Jones.42
William and Mary had much in common: both made their living with words, each was tremendously ambitious, they achieved far more in life than promised by their humble origins, wanderlust struck them both, and they had no desire to discuss their upbringings. William Harris was barely cold in the ground when Mary Jones began work on her life story in the spring of 1923. No flood of intimate memories followed his death. He is not mentioned in the Autobiography, but then neither is any other member of her family, except in passing. She wrote, after all, an autobiography of Mother Jones, not Mary Jones.43
The idea of Mother Jones’s writing a book had been around for years. In 1910, Miners, Magazine reported that she was gathering materials, and added, “A history of the labor movement penned by ‘Mother’ Jones will be a volume that will be treasured by countless thousands of men and women.” Just before the war, she asked Clarence Darrow for help writing her life story, and in 1922, she wrote John Walker, “I am picking up notes to write my book and I want you to help me a little.” She became ill a few months later, but when she recovered, she told Walker that Darrow was after her to write her story and that she would do it, “for I cannot do anything else.” She needed to keep the memory of Mother Jones alive, to tell the version of her life she wanted remembered. The spring and summer of 1923 found her ensconced in Chicago at the home of Ed Nockles, secretary of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “I am working away—I can’t work very fast—the boys are good to me here,” she reported to Terence Powderly.44
We can only speculate on how the Autobiography was written. Having no permanent home, Mother Jones could not have saved many letters or newspaper clippings from which to work, but she already knew most of the stories she wanted to tell, for they had long been set pieces in her speeches. Initially, Nockles served as secretary for the work, but soon Mary Field Parton (née Mary Field), a journalist who had penned a very flattering piece on Mother Jones for Everybody’s Magazine, assumed the role of editor. As a young woman, Parton had been a supporter of Eugene Debs, worked in a Chicago settlement house, become Darrow’s friend and mistress, and through Darrow she met Mother Jones. (She recalled of the notoriously parsimonious Darrow, “Once when I was worried about Mother Jones … he pulled a wad of rumpled money out of his pocket and told me to buy her some woolen underwear. It came to almost $100.”)45
“Writing” the Autobiography consisted of Mother Jones telling stories while Parton transcribed them. This is evident from the frequent misspellings of proper nouns—War John instead of Wardjon, M. F. Langdon for Emma F. Langdon, Roughner rather than Ruffner. Since such errors remained in the book, it is unlikely that Mother Jones ever read the manuscript, though it may have been read back to her for corrections. Parton must have edited fairly heavily since the Autobiography often departs from the grammar and diction of Mother Jones’s speeches. The language is cleaned up, and most swearing expunged. Parton seems to have accepted the order of events Mother Jones gave her, and since the old woman was never very good with dates, several errors of chronology appear. There are also long passages that seem to come straight from newspaper stories, particularly from The New York Times, which was indexed and available in Chicago libraries. Reports from government committees that investigated the mine wars also were consulted. With her advanced age and fragile health, Mother Jones found the work quite taxing. “I am getting so D–—tired writing this book,” she wrote Emma Powderly; “This work I am not used to but I am nearing the end.” Even after she finished, around August 1923, it must have taken Parton several months to edit the final draft, since the book did not appear until two years later.46
The Autobiography of Mother Jones was published by Charles H. Kerr and Company of Chicago, the largest English-language distributor of labor and radical works, though still a very small publisher by commercial standards. A Socialist and supporter of organized labor since the 1890s, Kerr published the International Socialist Review—long considered the voice of the Party’s left wing—in which some of Mother Jones’s early essays appeared, as well as works by Eugene Debs, Jack London, Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clarence Darrow, and Carl Sandburg. Kerr had the Autobiography typeset by John F. Higgins, himself a Socialist and keeper of a union shop. Higgins printed 4,500 copies and delivered them to Kerr in August 1925. Mother Jones got 250 copies in lieu of payment (not an uncommon arrangement for small presses), and Kerr shipped 125 copies to newspapers and magazines for review. Parton received five hundred dollars out of the Garland Fund, which was established to aid progressive causes; if the book sold well, Kerr would return the money to the fund.47
Clarence Darrow wrote a brief introduction to the first edition. Mother Jones is no philosopher, he tells us; activism is her forte. Her life evokes the heroes of the antislavery campaign: “Mother Jones is the Wendell Phillips of the labor movement.… She has the power of moving masses of men by her strong, living speech and action. She has likewise his disregard for personal safety.” Or again, “like [John] Brown, she has a singleness of purpose, a personal fearlessness and a contempt for established wrongs.” Also like these immortals, she is uncompromising; she sees right and wrong as clear-cut, which is precisely the origin of her restless courage.48
The Autobiography of Mother Jones is not a memoir in the sense of revealing a person in the act of becoming; there is no unfolding of character here, no revelation of intimacies. Nor is it an apologia, an acknowledgment of shortfalls, or a plea for exoneration. Mother Jones did not, for example, deny the Polly Pry charges; she did not mention them at all. On these pages, she has no interior life; the world of affairs is everything, interpersonal relationships all but nonexistent.49
The book is a long polemic, its goal to fire the faithful and convert nonbelievers. It reprises Mother Jones’s career, but it does so to emphasize the triumph of good over evil, which is to say, victory through solidarity for the family of labor. With an episodic structure and highly quotable style, it places Mother Jones at the center of social protest—organizing, cajoling, berating, triumphing. Sometimes the text reads like religious testimony, bearing witness to the extirpation of evil through faith; other times, it more resembles a melodrama of class oppression and resistance. There are defeats on these pages but no defeatism. “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living”—activism itself, regardless of outcome, is a victory.50
At the most superficial level, the Autobiography is a series of stories—the march of the Coaldale women, the house arrest in Pratt, West Virginia, the defeat of the steelworkers in 1919. The brief cameo appearances of Mary Harris and Mary Jones at the beginning set the stage. These matter-of-fact sketches of her as daughter, wife, mother, widow, teacher, seamstress, even nurse for the sick, establish her authority as a woman. She presents herself as someone people can identify with, a worker, an immigrant, an American—everywoman. Emphasizing her age and experience also licenses her to speak; her long life gave her venerability, and from venerability came authority.51
The Autobiography at times reads like an adventure story, a plot-driven action drama with a woman at the center of the excitement: “Late that night, a group of miners gathered about a mile from town between the boulders. We could not see one another’s faces in the darkness. By the light of an old lantern I gave them the [union] pledge.” The lesson, of course, is that heroism is available to all. The Autobiography also contains elements of another popular American genre, the success story. The lack of introspection, the main character’s luck, pluck, and hard work, her victories over adversity, all give the Autobiography a strange kinship to those tales of triumph in business and politics that were meant to fire Americans with virtuous ambition. Of course, Mother Jones turned the genre on its head—the hero here is a woman, she is not particularly humble, and she defines success in working-class, not bourgeois, terms. But above all, the Autobiography is a morality play, the story of a mother’s fight against the exploitation of her children. It is an emotional book, continually outraged, occasionally overwrought. Emotion authenticated motherhood, and motherhood made the emotions genuine.52
Although the book borrows heavily from Mother Jones’s public appearances, it is not merely stump speeches set in type. Its goals were to convert workers to organized labor and to justify beliefs to those who might not understand. Mother Jones addressed middle-class as well as working-class readers: “My class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapons of starvation.” Such words were intended less for believers than for skeptics. Miners know what they do for a living; they would not describe themselves with such sentimentality as men “who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.” In story after story, Mother Jones explains her life and, through it, a whole world of work and exploitation—of the realities of class—to readers who, she assumes, do not know much about such things. To reach the middle class, her language (hers and Parton’s) shifts from the vernacular to the sentimental; profanity is expunged, colloquialism cleaned up, and the tone elevated. The old anger is still there but also much more pity than usually crept into her speeches.53
In line with this shift in language, the Autobiography often depicts workers as hapless, uncertain what to do without Mother’s intervention. In her most self-absorbed moments, Mother Jones saw things that way, but she was usually more clear eyed, and her career was built on the belief that workers could empower themselves and change their own lives. Some of the book’s patronizing tone grew out of her need to claim a legacy by inflating her own accomplishments. One suspects too that Parton—whose reporting on Mother Jones following the Ludlow Massacre was worshipful and romantic—engendered this attitude.54
The book hits the old themes of patriotism and religion especially hard. George Washington’s name is invoked four times, Abraham Lincoln’s five. Mother Jones argues that militant labor organizing itself is patriotic, because patriotism and dissent go hand in hand. Worker solidarity reinforces republican selflessness; strikes for better conditions improve the nation by raising the standard of living and fostering democracy. Fenians, revoltosos, and Russian revolutionaries rightly use the United States as a safe haven to foment rebellion abroad, because America is the cradle of liberty.55
Even more than patriotism, the Autobiography is infused with religious imagery: “We camped in the open fields and held meetings on the road sides and in barns, preaching the gospel of unionism”; labor, Mother Jones feared, would be forced to “bear the cross for others’ sins”; capitalists “crucified” child laborers. She even describes organizing a local in a darkened church, and she compares company spies and union turncoats to Judas Iscariot, selling out their brothers for a handful of silver. The dramas of religion and of social struggle were one: “‘I think the strike is lost, Mother,’ said an old miner whose son had been killed. ‘Lost! Not until your souls are lost!’ said I.”56
The characters striding the Autobiography’s stage are mostly one-dimensional—craven capitalists, cowardly governors, selfless union men, corrupt labor bosses. Proclamations of Mother Jones’s own heroism get more than a little tiring, but we must remember that her voice comes to us from a time when publicly assertive women were still unusual. The Mother Jones persona—that self-assured “I”—is quite remarkable, especially coming from a working-class woman.57
Still, her desire for the spotlight precluded her giving much attention to others. The Autobiography fails to mention prominent women in labor or politics, much as Mother Jones failed to acknowledge them throughout her career. Kate Richards O’Hare, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger are never mentioned. Mother Jones’s tendency to scorn all middle-class reformers and philanthropists accounts for her ignoring some women, but, finally, in her desire to give herself the longest pedigree, she failed even to acknowledge others as co-workers in the cause.58
There are other important omissions. Although the Autobiography does not mask her radicalism, it fails to mention her presence at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, perhaps because of how vilified they had become in 1920s America. Moreover, she attacks the Socialist Party in these pages as hopelessly bourgeois, but she never mentions that she spent years working for them. Nor does she reveal that the United Mine Workers paid her for her efforts. And she says nothing about the humiliating Harding telegram.59
Mother Jones’s failure to mention John L. Lewis is also striking. Maybe she wished to avoid stirring disunity, but the very last chapter of the book, “Progress in Spite of Leaders,” reads like a buildup to an assault on Lewis. She describes the selflessness of the early union men—Powderly, Martin Irons, and others—then observes that too many modern leaders have wandered from the path blazed by these pioneers: “Never in the early days of the labor struggle would you find leaders wining and dining with the aristocracy; nor did their wives strut about like diamond-bedecked peacocks; nor were they attended by humiliated, cringing colored servants.” Having set Lewis up, however, she ignores him and launches into a harangue against the deceased John Mitchell, who serves as a surrogate for all other enemies.60
Perhaps her diatribes against careerist officials expressed her secret feeling that she could have run a giant union, done it better than the men under whom she served. After all, she watched countless mediocre, even incompetent, individuals assume leadership positions while she, as a woman, was never allowed to rise in the hierarchy. But her criticism was not just personal. Her evaluations of labor leaders held real insight, for she recognized the early signs of a fundamental flaw in the labor movement, a tumor that metastasized after she passed away. Many unions grew not only bureaucratic but corrupt; worse, centralized power threatened union democracy. Mother Jones disagreed with those like Lewis who believed that bureaucratization was essential to union success, that worker participation and education were secondary goals. Once again, she harked back to the old days of the Knights of Labor, for she still insisted that citizen-workers were labor’s source of strength, that men too concerned with power ultimately menaced the union movement. The fundamental tenet of her faith was belief in industrial democracy, in workers’ shaping their own futures.61
With all of its blindnesses, then, there is still something magnificent about The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Despite its self-righteous posturing, shortages of candor, lack of generosity toward others, and appalling dearth of self-awareness, it has keen social insight at its core. In the midst of the 1920s obsession with success, Mother Jones wrote with stark honesty of poverty, injustice, violence: “I told the great audience that packed the hall that when their coal glowed red in their fires, it was the blood of the workers, of men who went down into the black holes to dig it, of women who suffered and endured.… ‘You are being warmed and made comfortable with human blood!’”62
The Autobiography of Mother Jones is a deeply flawed yet powerful book. It made social class palpable for a culture trying to deny its existence. It spoke of solidarity crossing barriers of race, gender, and ethnicity. Above all, it expressed Mother Jones’s faith that working people would find justice. Crudely, imperfectly, but with a strong voice, she told of the excluded, remembered their suffering, and offered hope for their redemption.63
In a letter to the editor of The Nation in 1922, George P. West nominated Mother Jones for that magazine’s list of the twelve greatest American women: “She has preached the stamina and self-reliance of the old-time America,” West declared. “Her shrewdness and wisdom and courage and sincerity have impressed Presidents and Governors.… Love and tenderness are as warm in her as her courage.… She is loved and venerated in ten thousand humble homes.” West concluded that Mother Jones’s life was a national epic, and it was shameful that America’s “tradition of cheap gentility” kept her story from being told. But even if her story was told, who would listen?64
When the Autobiography finally appeared in print, Mother Jones was not pleased. She commented to John Walker that she planned to retain an attorney and go to Chicago. “I don’t trust that Charles Kerr,” she told Walker. “The book is not printed as I wrote it anyway, and I have never been satisfied with it.” It is unclear what displeased her. Maybe she felt that Parton—cutting and pasting stories, smoothing the prose, transforming idiomatic oral legends into writing—prettified the book. Perhaps she misunderstood the agreement with Kerr and assumed she would be paid a royalty. Maybe she did not believe the sales figures and assumed that he had exploited her hard work. Certainly pride must have made her incredulous that sales were so poor.65
The Autobiography of Mother Jones was a commercial failure. Fewer than two thousand copies were sold the first year, and fifteen hundred sets of sheets remained unbound, waiting for demand to catch up with supply. It never did. Reviews were scant, and not until the 1970s did a second edition appear. Except among militant devotees of the labor movement, Mother Jones’s name was rapidly being forgotten.66
Her letters to friends resumed the litany of physical woes, especially the crippling effects of rheumatism. She also acknowledged how much she depended on others now for daily care and a roof over her head. “It looks as if I will not get well again,” she confided to John Walker in 1924. And later, “O John I … cannot hold a pen in my fingers They are crippled.” She made her last strike appearance in Chicago in 1924, returning to her old trade to rally dressmakers, hundreds of whom were arrested and blacklisted during an ill-fated four-month-long walkout. She also visited labor’s martyrs in prison, including Thomas J. Mooney, Matthew Schmidt, and J. P. MacNamara in California, wrote to governors on their behalf, even proposed that the proceeds from her autobiography be used to help her boys.67
She dealt too now with the deaths of old friends. “Well John,” she wrote Walker, “the one faithfull friend I had for the last 45 years has passed away Terence V. Powderly he fought my battles for years he faced all the Slanders and boldly Deffended me.” On top of her own maladies and the deaths of others, she witnessed the erosion of all she had worked for. “There is a peculiar apathy in the labor movement to day, unknown in its history,” she mused. She wrote with alarm about another organization stealing some of labor’s thunder: “They have a hard time in Colorado.… The Ku Klux control the whole state now.… I am afraid they are going to create a great deal of trouble before they are done away with.” Such observations grew less common as her letters became shorter and more cryptic, and her political sympathies veered wildly now. Having championed the left wing of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1923, she endorsed Calvin Coolidge for President in 1924, apparently because his opponent supported the operators in the West Virginia strikes. She also backed conservative senator William Borah from Idaho, because of his loyalty to her during the troubles on Paint and Cabin Creeks.68
When Mother Jones was not with Emma Powderly in Washington, she found companionship on her trips to California. She stayed with well-off friends, like the philanthropist Catherine Yarnell, who invited Mother Jones to live with her and wrote her checks for a few hundred dollars now and again. Mother Jones described one “glorious” dinner party in Los Angeles at which she was the center of attention. Everyone there “had an open mind and advanced ideas,” and a professor even asked if he might bring his students by to hear her stories about the labor movement. Yet neither friends nor California’s lovely weather kept her sadness at bay. “This day is just like a June day,” she wrote Emma Powderly from Pasadena during the winter of 1926, “and this evening is like a spring evening.” But there was no excitement, not even a band “to beat the last dirge for some poor person who is to be laid away.”69
By 1927, her health had become too fragile for train rides to the coast. Slowing down allowed Mother Jones to cultivate friendships that her earlier frenetic life precluded, and this especially included Emma. Old-timers from the labor movement dropped by the house often, and though seeing them did not restore her health, “still,” she observed, “it does away with the blues.” More, the Powderly household was an extended family of children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles, the sort of Irish American household Mother Jones had not known for decades, a comforting surrogate family.70
Late in 1928, John Walker sent Mother Jones a check for one thousand dollars, money she originally loaned him for his daughter’s education and to purchase a home. She wrote Walker that he relieved her of much worry: “I was limited to three dollars and hardly knew what to do.” Of course, her daily needs were met at Emma’s home, but still she told Walker that before his letter arrived, she did not know “whether to ask William Green [who had become president of the AFL in 1924] to help me or to apply to the poor house,” and she added, “You know I do not like to sponge off any one or live like a pauper.” Walker apologized for not returning the money sooner, and added, “I feel that I owe you and all the folks that have lived like you, for everything that I have in this world that is worth having, and as long as I have a dollar you will be welcome to it.… It will be just repaying, in a small measure, the obligations we are all under to you.”71
It was a lovely testament to their friendship, but in fact Mother Jones was not so poor. Legal papers indicate that she had more than six thousand dollars, half of it in cash, plus bonds and a few shares of stock. Since she had lived in others’ households for several years now, she probably had been banking the money that friends like Green and Yarnell sent. Shortly before she died, she transferred guardianship of her assets from Emma Powderly to Ed Nockles and John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor for donation to needy families.72
As the end neared, Mother Jones made plans for her own funeral. Back in 1923, just after finishing work on her autobiography, she gave a speech, one of her last, at the Virden Day celebration in Mount Olive, Illinois: “When the last call comes for me … will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden? … They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America.”73
It was at Mount Olive that the United Mine Workers won the victory that allowed them to organize the Central Competitive Field. Back in 1898, most operators were ready to accept a union contract, but the owners in Virden held out. They tried to bring in scabs from Alabama, blacks who were not informed of the strike. On October 12, when their train pulled into Virden, armed miners shot it out with the guards on board. In the ten-minute battle, forty-seven union men were shot, seven mortally; four of nine wounded detectives died. None of the would-be strikebreakers was hit, but the train never unloaded its cargo at Virden, and the coal company was forced to settle the strike. It was this final battle in the fight to organize the Central Competitive Field that made the UMW the most powerful union in America.74
Union workers began commemorating Miners Day on October 12, 1899, in Mount Olive, and every year thousands of families came into town for a parade, music, and speeches. In the Union Miners Cemetery lay the four men from that small Illinois village who fell in the battle of Virden. It was (and is) the only union-owned burial place in America, opened by UMW Local 728 in 1898, when other cemeteries refused to accept the union’s dead. Here the martyrs fell; here the union buried its own; here the UMW became America’s first great industrial union. And here Mother Jones chose as her final resting place.75
Even as she grew more frail—and perhaps because her end was near—she received a stream of visitors at the Powderly home, union officials, workers, politicians, friends. Among these were Walter and Lillie May Burgess, who had known Mother Jones since 1905. When Mother Jones felt up to it, the Burgesses took her to their truck farm in Hyattsville, Maryland, for visits. By 1929, it had become difficult for Emma Powderly, herself an old woman now, to care for her aging visitor, so in May of that year, Mother Jones moved in with the Burgesses. The stream of well-wishers now flowed to Hyattsville. When not catching up on union matters, Mother Jones enjoyed the country air, riding into town for an ice cream cone, chatting with the local parish priest, or lying on the sofa and listening to the Burgesses’ neighbor play Irish tunes on the piano. She also gave occasional interviews. She told the newspaper Labor that if she could only walk, she would still be out organizing workers. In The Washington Times, she offered verbal support to the striking textile workers of North Carolina. The Washington Evening Star reported her remarks that Prohibition was an invasion of personal liberty and that she drank whiskey herself under orders from her doctor. She added that she intended to live fifteen more years.76
Mother Jones was ninety-two years old on her hundredth birthday. She began thinking about a party at least two and a half years in advance, knowing that it would put her in the spotlight for a final time. She wrote Nockles and Fitzpatrick at the end of 1927 that she hoped to come to Chicago to celebrate the event. But as May 1, 1930, drew closer, it became clear that her health would not permit the trip. Instead, the Burgesses began preparing for a party in their home. A funeral seemed more likely than a birthday when pneumonia struck Mother Jones down in February, but she rallied. Ten days before May Day, The New York Times reported that eighty years of industrial battles—as always, the press followed her lead in exaggerating her life story—had left her “a frail shell.” Still, “that amazing voice leaps out, eloquent and cutting, to lash what she terms the ‘foes’ of labor.”77
Three days before the party, the Baltimore Sun devoted the lead story of its Sunday magazine to the old warrior and included a large drawing of her. The article measured just how far legend and life diverged. She was there at Ludlow when the machine guns were turned on the women and children, “and she made her voice rise above the din and smoke … until the rich man in lower Broadway heard it.” Rockefeller speedily remedied conditions in his mines, and the two became fast friends. She worked for the old Appeal to Reason, “but when it became radical and took on a Socialistic and even anarchistic taint, she turned on it with an almost unbelievable fury.” Now “night and morning she prays for Mooney’s freedom,” and should that prayer be granted, “she is willing to call it a day, the battle over, the victory won.” Her apotheosis was complete. Prayerful, anti-radical, a friend of Rockefeller’s, she had been declawed, defanged, domesticated.78
But she was no sweet old lady yet. On the day of her party, when Lillie May Burgess tried to pin a corsage on her, Mother Jones snapped, “Hell, I never have worn those and I don’t want to now.” When she took a drink of water and someone reminded her that she used to drink beer, she cursed “those old fools” who forced Prohibition on the country. Union bakers made an enormous cake, decorated with one hundred candles. Local fire departments provided bunting to decorate the Burgess home, and the Soldiers Home Band played tune after tune. Although she was bedridden most of the time now, Mother Jones walked down the stairs, assisted by her hosts, and took a seat in the back yard. Hundreds of well-wishers arrived, telegrams poured in all day and all night, and a delegation of one hundred unemployed men, led by Dan O’Brien, the “Hobo King” and a veteran of Coxey’s Army, paid their respects. Workers, labor leaders, politicians, and friends all came to celebrate—and to say goodbye.79
She exchanged telegrams—pleasant, heartfelt messages—with young Rockefeller. She called him a “damned good sport” for sending his best wishes, since she had “licked him many times.” But she recalled for reporters that Rockefeller had her incarcerated, and she added, “Yes, I forgive them … but I don’t forget.” She also breathed a bit of her old fire for the newsreel cameras: “America was not built 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. A wonderful power is in the hands of women, too, but they don’t know how to use it. Capitalists sidetrack the women into clubs and make ladies of them. Nobody wants a lady, they want women.” She had long uttered such words, but here in 1930, with the labor movement sputtering and Mother Jones enfeebled, they seemed antiquated, even a bit sad.80
Mother Jones was delighted with her party, but it was her last public appearance. She returned to her room after the festivities and mostly remained there until the end of her life six months later. More than once she weakened, then rallied, but each setback took its toll. A few admirers were let in to discuss politics, labor issues, and, above all, the deepening depression, already worse than any in memory. Journalists came by for interviews or to check on her condition. In July, she dictated birthday greetings to John D. Rockefeller, Sr.: “Congratulations on the arrival of your ninety-first birthday. Thank God we have some men in the world yet as good as you.” But she told reporters, “I wouldn’t trade what I’ve done for what he’s done. I’ve done the best I could to make the world a better place for poor, hard-working people.” As her last public act, she sent one thousand dollars to John Walker for the United Mine Workers Reorganized, a group led by Illinois miners to oust John L. Lewis from his UMW presidency. Her goal, she said, was to help “defend the miners against leaders who are thinking more of themselves than they are of my boys.”81
As summer gave way to autumn, Mother Jones’s health broke down completely. A local priest administered extreme unction and the Blessed Sacrament. Finally, on November 30, 1930, Mother Jones passed away. The Certificate of Death gave senility as the cause of her demise. Her physician put it more bluntly: she just wore out.82
Two days after her death, a high requiem Mass was celebrated at St. Gabriel’s Church in Washington. In the audience sat working men and women, the Secretary of Labor, union presidents, the unemployed, and countless friends of Mother Jones. “Her zeal and earnestness in behalf of the poor will be a pleasant memory long after her body is gone,” intoned Father William Sweeney. Mother Jones would have bristled; Sweeney’s words made her seem just another charitable old woman, not the fiery organizer who led angry workers in their quest for justice. But he was merely following a trend that reduced the militant warrior to an old saint, that hid the angry matriarch of laboring families behind the sweet grandmother. The Mother Jones persona had always contained that danger.83
After Mass, a special railroad car took her body to St. Louis and, from there, to Mount Olive, following the route of Lincoln’s funeral sixty-five years earlier. Thirty-five hundred people lived in Mount Olive, but four or five times that number pressed into the depot when the train arrived on Thursday night. Survivors of the Virden Massacre carried her coffin to the Odd Fellows Temple, where it lay in state until Sunday. Mine families and union supporters by the thousands filed past the casket, past the mounds of flowers and the union banners.84
On Sunday, her admirers crowded Mount Olive’s Ascension Church, but only about three hundred of them made it inside. Loudspeakers carried the eulogy, delivered by Father John Maguire, a veteran of the 1919 steel strike and president of St. Viator’s College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, to the thousands standing outside. Thousands more of Mother Jones’s admirers heard the service over WCFL, the radio station of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “My Dear friends,” Maguire declared,
today in gorgeous mahogany furnished and carefully guarded offices in distant capitals wealthy mine owners and capitalists are breathing sighs of relief. Today upon the plains of Illinois, the hillsides and valleys of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, in California, Colorado and British Columbia, strong men and toil worn women are weeping tears of bitter grief. The reasons … are the same. Mother Jones is dead.85
Maguire recounted her heroic deeds, her life of work and struggle. “She had a small frail body,” he said, “but she had a great and indomitable spirit. She was relatively uneducated but she had a flaming tongue. She was poor, but she had a great blazing love for the poor, the down-trodden, and the oppressed. She was without influence but she had a mother’s heart, great enough to embrace the weak and defenseless babes of the world.” To her eloquence, courage, and love Maguire might have added towering ambition for herself and her people. Only with singular ambition could an old Irish widow so impress herself on the nation and help build a movement that challenged America’s culture of capitalist individualism with a culture of solidarity for working families. Towering ambition, and a remarkable flare for the dramatic.86
The men and women who attended Mother Jones’s funeral remembered her passion, but a convenient amnesia had settled like fog over their countrymen. During the 1920s, several large corporations embraced welfare capitalism, company unions, and “industrial democracy,” ideas popularized by Rockefeller after Ludlow. With labor unions in retreat, many workers gave corporate paternalism a try. Mother Jones’s obituaries blunted memories of America’s radical tradition and effaced the vision of the militant old warrior. Papers like The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune simply ran an Associated Press story that declared she opposed socialism, the IWW, and bolshevism, that she “stood for years by the principles of the American Federation of Labor.” The story added that she had a “distinct aversion” to woman suffrage but failed to note that she organized women in bold and militant protest. Even The Nation described her as “unqualifiedly averse to socialism.” Indeed, the press in general embraced this apostle of working-class militance by domesticating her: “She was never one of the hot and heedless radicals who would burn down the barn to get rid of the rats,” The Duluth Herald declared. “She lived to win the respect and admiration of all who recognized her truth and sincerity,” wrote the Youngstown Daily Vindicator. “She had been called a ‘menace’ in the old days … but she lived to know the admiration of those against whom she had battled,” said the Albany Evening News. Old age and death had rendered Mother Jones less fearsome; her enemies might love her now that she no longer threatened them. It was hard to imagine that anyone had ever thought of her as the most dangerous woman in America.87
11. The funeral of Mother Jones in Mount Olive, Illinois. Pictures of the Virden martyrs line the wall, and a wreath from the Chicago Federation of Labor rests above her casket (Courtesy State Historical Society of Wisconsin)