Mother Jones
Labor Agitator (1830-1930)

Even before Mary Harris Jones married and had a family of her own, she cared about the rights of children and exploited workers.  She began her working life as a teacher, but then became a seamstress, saying she preferred sewing to “bossing children around.”  As she sewed for wealthy families, she was constantly aware of huge gaps between these privileged folks and the far less fortunate.  After unthinkable losses in her young married life, she developed a fiery passion for exposing injustice.  Her fearless, witty, audacious manner inspired people to let children be children and to protect thousands of workers in unsafe environments.  Her progressive style and ideas continue to be relevant today and are reflected in the revelatory journalism of the magazine named after her, Mother Jones. 
- Margaret Wakeley

Mary Harris Jones bore four children and saw them all cut down by yellow fever.  But it was her activities in the second half of her life as a tireless agitator, advocate for the oppressed, and general “hell-raiser,” that earned her the affectionate title Mother Jones.  Where did she live?  “I live in the United States,” she told a Congressional Committee, “but I do not know exactly where.  My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.  I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

Among the “respectable pirates" who owned the coal mines, railroads, and steel mills, her name was spoken with contempt.  But to the great masses who labored in the darkness of the anthracite pits, or coughed out their youth working sixty-five hours a week in the mills, she was indeed a mother, and more – a ministering angel.  With her black dress, white hair, and quaint glasses, she might have passed for anyone’s grandmother – until she opened her mouth.  Describing her life’s work, she said, “I have tried to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer – and to stir up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightfully theirs.”  But woe to anyone who called her a “lady”: “God Almighty created women,“ she said, but it was the Rockefeller thieves who created ladies.”

Born in 1830 to a family of landless peasants in County Cork, Ireland, Mary Harris had rebellion in her blood.  “I belong to a class,” she would later say, “which has been robbed, exploited, and plundered down through many long centuries.  And because I belong to that class, I have an impulse to go and help break the chains.”  After her grandfather was arrested and hanged as a rebel, her family emigrated to America in 1841.  Mary was educated as a teacher and eventually settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where in 1860 she married an iron molder and union man named George Jones.  It was there, while the Civil War raged around them, that she bore her children and experienced her only spell of family life.  In 1867 an outbreak of yellow fever struck the city with terrible suddenness.  Within quick succession Mary lost each of her children, and then her husband, leaving her alone and widowed at the age of thirty-seven.

Moving to Chicago, she worked as a seamstress.  She was present to witness the great fire of 1871, which destroyed a hundred thousand homes.  She herself was among the homeless.  It was while walking one night among the ruined streets that she came upon a meeting of the Knights of Labor, an idealistic organization whose motto was “An injury to one is an injury to all.”  Intrigued by what she heard, Mary then and there devoted herself to the cause of workers’ rights.

The postwar boom was followed by a harsh depression.  All across the nation hundreds of thousands were out of work and left to beg or starve.  Demonstrations and bloody riots erupted in New York, Chicago, and other cities.  Protesters marched under the slogan “Bread or blood.”  As a traveling organizer for the Knights of Labor, Mary was in Philadelphia when troops fired into a crowd, killing twenty-six people.  In labor disputes around the country, federal troops and state militia effectively served as employees of the railroad companies and the factory bosses.

Mary worked in relative obscurity for many years before she achieved her full fame in the 1890s as an agitator for the United Mine Workers.  From Virginia to Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and out to Colorado, “Mother Jones” became a legendary figure.  Her presence and fiery oratory could move men and women to tears and then embolden them to action.  The sight of her white hair could shame armed deputies into lowering their rifles at her approach.  One time in Colorado she walked up to a machine gun, poised to open fire on a line of demonstrators; placing her hand over the barrel, she simply turned it toward the ground and walked on past.

Knowing full well the power of her presence, the bosses and their government friends constantly tried to stifle her voice.  She was repeatedly, and illegally, detained by company guards, militia, and federal troops.  Sometimes this meant being hustled out of town on the next train.  But well into her eighties she was imprisoned in makeshift jails and holding cells – what she called “bastilles.”  In one case she was held incommunicado for six weeks in a dark, underground cellar, fed on bread and water, and left to fight off the cellar rats with a broken bottle.

None of this deterred her.  She emerged every time indomitable and undefeated.  Decades after most organizers had retired from the fight, burned out, or died, Mother Jones continued her mission.  To interfere with strike-breaking scab labor, she organized women into “bucket and broom brigades” who would stir up so much noise that mules would refuse to enter the mines.  To raise awareness of exploitative child labor, she led a procession of three hundred young textile workers on a “Children’s Crusade,” marching from Philadelphia to New York.  Stopping at meetings along the way, she would introduce girls and boys with mutilated hands, “tiny babies of six years old with faces of sixty who did an eight-hour shift for ten cents a day.”  In a letter to President Roosevelt, she wrote, “We ask you, Mr. President, if our commercial greatness has not cost us too much by being built on the quivering hearts of helpless children.  We are now marching toward you in the hope that your tender heart will counsel with us to abolish this crime.”

Mother Jones was raised in the Catholic Church.  By and large she had little use for the ministers of organized religion, who preached a gospel of “pie in the sky when you die.”  But her speech was steeped in the language of the prophets and the revolutionary message of the Gospels.  “The labor movement, my friends, was a command from God Almighty.  He commanded the prophet to redeem the Israelites that were in bondage; he organized the men into a union and led them out of the land of bondage and robbery and plunder into the land of freedom.”  Of those who enjoyed fancy luxuries, bought with the blood of the poor, she said, “I wish I was God Almighty!  I would throw down something some night from heaven and get rid of the whole blood-sucking bunch.”

Mother Jones never did retire.  She lived to turn one hundred, and then died on November 30, 1930.  On the eve of her death she expressed the wish that she could “live another hundred years in order to fight to the end that there would be no more machine guns and no more sobbing of little children.”

Sincere thanks to Robert Ellsberg
for permission to use this chapter from his book Blessed Among All Women:  Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time.

Additional Resources
See:  Mother Jones Speaks:  Collected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York:  Pathfinder Press, 1983); Linda Atkinson, Mother Jones:  The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York:  Crown, 1978).