- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
This Week in History: Mother Jones’ struggle
“I was born of the struggle and the torment and the pain. A child of the wheel, a brat of the cogs, a woman of the dust … When a laborer sweats his sweat of blood and weeps his tears of blood a remedy is thrust upon the world. I am that remedy.”
Thus Mother Jones, the “most dangerous woman in America” according to those in power, described her life of suffering.
And really, those few words are a good summation of the first 60 years of her life. Hers was a life lived largely on the margins of the world, far distant from the tectonic movements of her day.
We know this at least: Mary Harris was born in Ireland in 1837 (although she later claimed a birthdate of 1830 to add to the grey-haired persona of a grandmotherly figure). She immigrated to Canada with her parents, graduated from school and worked for a time as a school teacher in Michigan.
She married a man named George Jones in Memphis in 1861 and had several children. Her first major encounter with tragedy saw her entire family, husband and children, die of yellow fever in 1867.
She travelled to Chicago and opened a seamstress shop just in time for the great 1871 Chicago fire. She had become the female counterpart to the protagonist in the old folk song “A Man of Constant Sorrow.”
Up until then, Mary Jones had lived a life of obscurity, leaving no trace of her daily struggle on the historical record beyond census records and what she later recalled to journalists. Her story is a warning to those who would oppress and a comfort for those who suffer still, that even the most obscure of us can blaze a trail across society, whose passing forever alters the status quo.
Her husband had been a member of a union in Tennessee. Perhaps that’s what spurred her to action after her life burned to ashes in 1871. Or maybe she was just plain pissed off and tired of the drudgery she had wallowed in her whole life.
Whatever the reason, beginning in the 1870s, Mary Jones sought community in the Knights of Labor, a national labor union that sought fair wages and working conditions for the country’s laborers. Having lost her family and her business, Mary Jones threw herself into her new role, and found in the struggle a new family. She was rechristened Mother Jones.
Following the philosophy of “wherever there’s a fight,” Mother Jones travelled the nation to support strikes by laborers in the railroad, steel, copper, brewing and textile industries. In the 1890s, she found her a home as an organizer for the United Mine Workers of West Virginia.
In a style that today would seem rambling and bombastic, Mother Jones’ public speeches were widely hailed at the time for their fervor and intensity. Upton Sinclair, author and exposer of the unhealthy meat packing industry in his book The Jungle, was a huge fan of Mother Jones. He described her fiery perambulations in these terms:
“All over the country she had roamed, and wherever she went, the flame of protest had leaped up in the hearts of men; her story was a veritable Odyssey of revolt.”
Her most powerful tool was her ability to weave stories into her speeches. In 1912, she gave her famous speech at a miner’s meeting in West Virginia – famous in part because it was faithfully recorded by a stenographer and remains the most complete example of her speaking style.
In that speech alone, she weaves together stories of the doomed miners and their meager lunch boxes, the clueless U.S. Sen. Dick and the mine owner’s wife and her pampered dog.
She exhorts the crowd, calling them her “boys” and passes around a hat to collect beer money for “the miners who came up here broke.” Is it any wonder she was labelled “the most dangerous woman in America” by a West Virginia attorney?
She was a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” and when she spoke, the powerful groaned.
She focused so much on the economic and social evils of her day that she ended up on the wrong side of a few social justice causes.
For instance, she was opposed to woman suffrage. She believed that to advocate for the vote would serve as a distraction from the underlying economic issues facing working women. She saw the whole movement – in retrospect not entirely incorrectly – as a rich woman’s battle.
On the topic, she said publicly “the plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.”
As for her people, the workers, they had more pressing concerns. When the Colorado militia killed 20 women and children at a miner’s tent colony in Ludlow in 1914, Mother Jones raised enough hell for a Congressional hearing to finally be called. Oh sure, Mother Jones lost as many fights as she won. But in a career that spanned decades, that was still a lot of wins.
As the years went on, the gray-haired agitator continued her fight for the oppressed. She travelled to Mexico in 1921 for the Pan American Federation of Labor.
She lived her final years with friends and on her self-proclaimed 100th birthday, May 1, 1930, she gave her final public speech.
Although a short one, her final message to her “boys” the world over, was recorded on a moving picture camera, giving future generations a tantalizing peek at the woman who led a movement.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.