Memories of Mother Jones still nurtured rebellion even after her death. In the summer of 1932, in the very depths of the Great Depression, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis agreed to a contract that so angered many Illinois miners, they walked off their jobs. The men gathered in Mount Olive, formed a caravan fifteen thousand strong, and headed downstate to organize their brothers. They clashed not only with police but with UMW stalwarts, and soon the rebels formed a new organization, the Progressive Mine Workers of America.1
PMWA leaders declared that they acted in the spirit of Mother Jones and that one of their first orders of business was to place a proper marker over her grave. They challenged the UMW in court and won the right to build the memorial. By 1936, PMWA locals and their women’s auxiliaries had raised over sixteen thousand dollars for the project. Workers donated their labor and erected eighty tons of Minnesota pink granite, with bronze statues of two miners flanking a twenty-foot shaft featuring a bas-relief of Mother Jones at its center. At the dedication on Miners Day, October 11, 1936, fifty thousand people came to Mount Olive for a parade, tributes to Mother Jones, and denunciations of John L. Lewis and his “fascist” United Mine Workers. Thereafter, the annual gathering in Mount Olive became known as “Mother Jones Day.”2
Her memory survived in folklore. Just three months after her passing, a young singer named Gene Autry recorded a song called “The Death of Mother Jones”:
The world today’s in mourning
O’er the death of Mother Jones;
Gloom and sorrow hover
Around the miners’ homes.
This grand old champion of labor
Was known in every land;
She fought for right and justice
She took a noble stand.
The tune was elegiac, and the style understated. It was not a commercially successful song, and certainly the lyrics were too hackneyed to capture the old woman’s singularity.3
Although it quickly went out of print, “The Death of Mother Jones” did not die out altogether, not in the mountains, for it took on a life of its own in oral tradition. No one knows who wrote the song, but local singers in the mine country kept it alive, and even schoolchildren learned the lyrics. Two years after Mother Jones’s passing, one teacher recalled:
The great moment for the class comes when, a hundred strong, students and teachers, grizzled miners with their tired wives, nursing babies at their breasts, and children of all sizes stand under the trees with dusk coming on singing “The Death of Mother Jones,” and “Solidarity Forever.” It is a ragged crowd, inarticulate and downtrodden, but for the moment there is an exaltation that fills the spirit of all who participate in the gathering.
Years later, another mountain song boldly declared, “Mother Jones is not forgotten.”4
Legends embellishing her fearlessness also kept her memory alive in the mine country. James Farrance told of seeing her in Monongah, West Virginia, during an organizing drive: “She came down Pike Street in a buggy and horse. Two company thugs grabbed the horse by the bridle and told her to turn around and get back down the road. She wore a gingham apron, and she reached under it and pulled out a .38 special pistol and told them to turn her horse loose, and they sure did.… She wasn’t afraid of the devil.”5
Women of West Virginia remembered her remarkable courage with special fondness. Grace Jackson described Mother Jones leading a march in Leewood on Cabin Creek in 1912. When armed guards confronted the marchers with a cannon, Mother Jones cussed them and dared them to shoot. “She didn’t care nothing for Christian language,” Jackson concluded, “because she loved the people, and hated them operators.… Oh, she was a female Robin Hood if ever there was.” Mandy Porter recalled seeing Mother Jones in a restaurant in Mingo County, surrounded by gun-toting men. Despite the threat of violence everywhere, she still rode through the coalfields and made her speeches. Monia Baumgartner remembered bullets whizzing past Mother Jones as she spoke, but the old woman finished her talk, then admonished young Monia, “Now don’t you get scared.”6
Although Mother Jones lived on in the folklore of the mine country, elsewhere her memory faded quickly. Her name rarely found its way into the news after her death. She had backed the losing side in the UMW, so as John L. Lewis’s star rose, her memory was relegated to the shadows. Moreover, when the Communist Party emerged as America’s dominant leftist organization, many labor leaders became staunchly anti-radical, and they found ideas like hers embarrassing if not dangerous. Mother Jones would have been an ideal candidate for canonization in the popular front, that broad Communist-led coalition of progressive organizations and ideas of the late 1930s which extolled a wide range of American heroes. But twenty years had passed since her last big organizing drive, and memories of her had grown dim. Except in the mine country, she was all but forgotten in mid-century America, with its spasms of witch-hunting that evoked the dark days of Haymarket and the Red Scare.7
Then came the 1960s and their aftermath, when Mother Jones gained new life as an icon of revolt. Her legend grew most prominent in the southern mountains, where a tide of labor militance and community organizing was on the rise. In a 1970 issue of People’s Appalachia, a leftist newsletter, Keith Dix offered a brief synopsis of her life, quoted Clarence Darrow’s belief that she was “the most forceful and picturesque figure in the American labor movement,” and argued that her memory was spreading to young people who sought social change. As if to prove Dix’s point, a popular pamphlet, “The Thoughts of Mother Jones,” published in 1971, excerpted some of her most epigrammatic lines. In 1972, a long front-page article in The New York Times tided “Ideal of Unity Stirs Appalachian Poor” declared that whereas images of movie stars stared down from walls across America, “here in a storefront office in Appalachia, the pop poster features Mother Jones.”8
Beyond the old mining country, her name reemerged during the folk-song revival on new recordings of “The Death of Mother Jones” and other songs. The Charles Kerr Company finally issued a second edition of The Autobiography of Mother Jones in 1972, and two years later, the journalist Dale Fetherling published the first and only book-length biography of her. In 1976, Mother Jones magazine appeared, featuring an editorial announcement that included an artist’s sketch, a romanticized description of her life, and a promise of muckraking journalism in the Progressive Era tradition. Union newspapers began to run features about her, though these emphasized her colorful character more than her radical ideas. Even daily papers on occasion retraced her steps, quoted her speeches, and marveled at how much relations between labor and management had improved since her day. Books for young adults appeared, too, as well as stage adaptations of her life; she even appeared in a novel. As women’s history developed into an important field within the historical profession, Mother Jones received at least brief mention in several works. Finally, Edward Steel and Philip Foner brought out substantial editions of her letters and speeches, and Kerr published yet another edition of her autobiography.9
Her old fire rekindled again in the late 1980s when Pittston Coal Company’s harsh policies led to a bitter strike in Appalachia. In the midst of the struggle, forty women, all miners and UMW members, occupied the company’s offices for thirty hours. They talked about Mother Jones during their sit-in, and one of their leaders recalled, “If somebody would say ‘I’m tired,’ we would say: ‘Mother Jones, there was times she would be tired.… If we’ve got to go to jail and pull time, we will. Mother Jones did.’” When police arrested the women, they identified themselves simply as the “Daughters of Mother Jones.”10
Mother Jones had found her way back to the fringes of American memory. The U.S. Labor Department inducted her into its “Labor Hall of Fame” in 1992, alongside Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis. The state of Pennsylvania erected a statue of her on Penn Square in downtown Philadelphia, commemorating the march of the mill children, and the governor even proclaimed May 1, 1993, “Mother Jones Day.” A special 1997 issue of Life magazine, “Celebrating Our Heroes,” named her one of the twenty-five “most heroic Americans ever.” (She was not, however, heroic enough to deserve much text, just a few lines on how, after the death of her family, “she hit the road and spent the rest of her hundred-year life traveling with her Crusaders from mine to mill.”) At the end of the 1990s, Irish America magazine gave her a prominent place among “The Greatest Irish-Americans of the Century.” As the millennium ended, her name was well enough known that The New York Times called an organizer of computer workers “The Mother Jones of Silicon Valley.”11
Her memory, then, has enjoyed a modest reawakening. But largely forgotten still is the old radical, preaching her sermons of solidarity to working families. She is more an elf of good causes now, a twinkly-eyed grandmother, than the embattled champion of American workers.
What is Mother Jones’s legacy? In a narrow sense, her accomplishments were limited. She lost more industrial battles than she won, and the United Mine Workers failed to organize the entire coal industry. Moreover, her belief in women’s inherent nurturing qualities blinded her to a whole range of emerging issues, including women’s right to equality in political, social, and economic life. She never even found a way of expressing the injustice of less-than-competent men serving as high union officials while she, with her intelligence, ability, and ambition, was kept out. Her bent toward the practical rather than the theoretical sometimes made her evasive about means and ends and about articulating a long-term vision of the future. By the time she died, many unions had rejected their democratic heritage, labor’s power had declined steeply, and leftists had been hounded into silence. Equally important, many workers prospered modestly in the consumer society that emerged in the 1920s, and they were not so interested in old struggles and dreams.
Yet there is much more to tell. Mother Jones constructed an amazing life of courage and commitment. At a time when American labor was riven by racism and nativism, she sought, though imperfectly, to bring black and immigrant workers into the fold. For her, solidarity was not just a union slogan but a culture, a way of life, one that rejected America’s worship of individualism and embraced instead the community of labor.
If Mother Jones advocated that women tend to their homes, she did so out of a belief that family was the bedrock of working-class life. This was how most laboring people saw it, too, for given their harsh economic circumstances, men, women, and children knew that they must depend on one another for survival. In place of the untrammeled rule of the marketplace, she substituted her metaphor of the family of labor, which assumed that all change must be directed toward creating humane communities. As Mother Jones, she invoked wrenching images of blood stolen, bodies mangled, and youth exploited to dramatize the injustice of poverty in America. Above all, she gave people hope and told them that their aspirations for change were in the best traditions of patriotism and religion. Hundreds of thousands of American workers fought for and received better wages and working conditions during her years of activism, and they embraced a renewed ideal of democratic citizenship.
The way Mother Jones lived her life was breathtaking. She tailored her appearance to match every sentimental notion about mothers. Then she subverted the very idea of genteel womanhood on which such stereotypes were based with her vituperative, profane, electric speeches. Women—especially old women—were not supposed to have opinions about politics and economics; they were not supposed to travel alone; they were too delicate for controversy. Yet there she was, haranguing workers, berating politicians, attacking the “pirates,” and telling women to take to the streets, all under the cover of sacred motherhood. Before the business of public relations even existed, she organized events that garnered tremendous publicity. By creating Mother Jones, she manufactured her own image, getting maximum exposure for her cause.
Mother Jones began with nineteenth-century ideological tools—the concept of Irish exile, Catholicism’s renewed cult of Mary, antislavery doctrine, producer ideology, republicanism, separate spheres for men and women, the idealization of motherhood—and reshaped them for twentieth-century battles. It was her lived experience of class—in Cork, Toronto, Memphis, and Chicago—that gave her insight into the suffering of working families. And it was her insistence on speaking for the poor, not as an outsider but as one of them, that made her so beloved. She was their Jeremiah, decrying injustice and calling its perpetrators to account. More, she was Mother Mary, interceding on their behalf.
And who was she to do all of this? A common woman whose early years yielded toil and tragedy and whose old age promised nothing but obscurity. She was expected to go silently through life, for she was a mere worker in a country that worshipped success, an immigrant in a nativist land, a woman in a male-dominated society, and an elderly person in a nation that cherished youth. Hers was a voice that Americans were not supposed to hear. That was her final legacy—out of nothing but courage, passion, and commitment, she created a unique voice, a prophetic voice, and raised it in the cause of renewing America’s democratic promise.