Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

Born May 1, 1830

County Cork, Ireland

Died November 30, 1930

Silver Spring, Maryland

Irish-born American labor organizer

"I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.… My address is like my shoes: it travels with me.… I abide where there is a fight against wrong."

Once a teacher and dressmaker, Mary Harris Jones, otherwise known as Mother Jones, became a legendary labor organizer and champion of workers' rights. At a time when women were denied a role in politics, Jones played an active part in helping to correct the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, a period marked by the widespread replacement of manual labor by machines that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the U.S. Senate, she was denounced as the "grandmother of all agitators" (someone who stirs up public feeling on controversial issues). Among poor workers, she was fondly called "Mother Jones." People who saw her stand up to speak at union gatherings were at first taken in by her kindly, demure (modest) look. But there was nothing at all demure about what Jones had to say, and she did not shrink from saying it loudly, in strong, plain words. Jones's calling was speaking out for the rights and dignity of workers, and in this she never tired.

The Industrial Revolution eventually resulted in an enormous improvement in the everyday lives of workers worldwide, none more so than in the United States. But along the way, workers of all ages, from children of six to adults of sixty, sometimes suffered cruelly from hunger, from disease, from living in tumbledown shacks or overcrowded city slums (poor, rundown neighborhoods). Death or crippling injuries caused by industrial accidents were common. Jones spent her entire life—into her one-hundredth year—leading a struggle to improve the lives of working people in the United States. In The Autobiography of Mother Jones, she agreed with the description of her voiced in the Senate, that she was an agitator: "I'm not a humanitarian," she said. "I'm a hell-raiser."

As Mother Jones, the life of Mary Harris Jones took on a larger-than-life, almost mythical, quality. Much of what we know of her early years comes from her own autobiography, written late in her life. She did not become a full-time labor organizer until she was in her sixties, when she turned into a powerful symbol for the union movement: a grandmotherly figure behind whose modest appearance was a determination to fight against the social injustices of the Industrial Revolution.

Born in Ireland to a family of rebels

Mary Harris was the oldest child of poor tenant farmers who tried to scratch out a living on a scraggly piece of rented land in Cork, Ireland. The land and any crops on it belonged to a British landlord, as was common in those days. There was no such thing as a tenant farmer making a profit; profits, if any, went to the landlord, who might sometimes toss a bit of money to his tenants. In addition, tenants owed money for the rent of the land. When they couldn't pay the rent, which happened often, they were thrown off the land and out of their homes.

In the 1830s many of these poor, starving people were desperate enough to act against the landlords by burning and vandalizing property. British troops were called in to restore order. Mary Harris's grandfather was hanged for resisting the troops, and her father would have been hanged too, if the British had found him. He eluded authorities and eventually made it safely to the United States. Soon he was working on a construction crew in New York and saving his money to bring his family to America.

In 1838 Mary, her mother, and two younger brothers left Ireland and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to join her father. The family settled in Toronto, Canada, where they had enough money to live comfortably. Young Mary and her brothers all went to the public schools, where Mary did especially well. After elementary school, Mary went on to high school while her brothers left school to work for the railroad. Mary excelled at giving speeches and debating, and after graduation she went on to college, intending to become a teacher. From her mother she had learned how to make dresses, ensuring that she would have another marketable skill going out into the world.

In 1859 Mary was teaching at a Roman Catholic school in Detroit, Michigan. She became disheartened with the harsh rules and the low pay and decided to try dressmaking in Chicago, Illinois. "I preferred sewing to bossing little children," she wrote in her autobiography. But this job did not prove successful, so when she heard that there were teaching jobs in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1861, she decided to try her luck there. It was a turning point in her life.

Awakening the tiger

Within a few months of arriving in Memphis, Mary Harris met and married George Jones, a skilled ironworker. George was an active member of the Iron Molders International Union, which aimed to gain better working conditions and better pay for its members. She and her new husband were of the same mind about how to look at the world. For instance, they were both opposed to slavery; although in the pro-slave South during the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), they had to be careful about what they said.

Mary experienced for herself the poverty and slum conditions that were the lot of factory workers at that time. She and her family lived in the Pinch area of Memphis, where many working-class Irish immigrants lived in overcrowded, rundown, and unhealthy conditions. She experienced through her husband the nightmarish conditions in which he worked: twelve hours huddled over a workbench in a dark room where the fire was almost unbearably hot.

The U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, and for the next couple of years things were looking up for the Jones family. They now had four young children. George was elected an official of the Iron Molders Union and traveled about spreading the union message and organizing workers. Mary eagerly supported her husband's union work.

It is unknown whether Mary had ever heard of yellow fever before the deadly infectious disease, which is spread by mosquitoes, struck her family in 1867. Within a week, her four children, ranging in age from a few weeks to five years, were dead. Her husband died that same year, in an industrial accident. At age thirty-seven, Mary was left alone. Her salvation was her ability to look outside of herself. Soon she was caring for other victims of yellow fever.

Back to Chicago

Mary Harris Jones had been devastated by the sudden death of her husband and children, but she realized that she had to go on living and decided to return to Chicago for another try at dressmaking. Her experiences as the wife of a union organizer and her work in Chicago made her increasingly aware of the marked contrast between the lifestyles of her wealthy clients and the workers just barely making a living in factories.

"We worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives," Jones wrote in her autobiography. "Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificence on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care."

Just as she was gaining financial success, disaster struck Jones a second time. The great Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed one-sixth of the city, including Jones's home, shop, and all her possessions. Once again, her response was to step forward and help others, organizing soup kitchens and finding shelter for those left homeless after the fire.

Taking shelter in a church basement after the Chicago fire, she happened on a meeting of the Knights of Labor, a labor union formed just two years earlier by garment workers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The union's message of fighting for better pay and working conditions reawakened Jones's childhood experience of revolution in Ireland and her late husband's role as a labor union organizer. For the next half century, Jones traveled across the United States without a permanent home, promoting the causes of organized labor.

Mother Jones

By the 1880s, Jones had been working with a labor union for nearly ten years and had become known for her fiery speeches. She was able to lecture to prospective union members as if she were their mother, and the mine workers even called her "mother." Her age commanded respect, and her speaking skills held the workers' attention. Jones spoke the language of the streets, and her speeches were dotted with swear words. The rough and unskilled workers in the newly developing factories loved her style.

Where there was labor strife, Mother Jones was often there. Her rallying call in speeches to workers became famous: "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." In 1890 Mother Jones was hired as a paid organizer for the United Mine Workers Union (UMW). She also continued to campaign on behalf of textile workers, especially children (who often worked in factories during this time), as well as railroad workers.

The miners

Mother Jones spent much of her union career working on behalf of coal miners, especially in West Virginia and Colorado. Her role in these campaigns, which often involved violence, was a major contributor to her fame.

Starting with a miners' strike in Norton, Virginia, in 1891, Mother Jones took advantage of the sexism of her opponents in the battle with mine owners. She dressed conservatively, in long, lacy dresses and always in a bonnet. How could such a modest, elderly lady pose a threat in the rough, male world of coal mining? Yet violence often seemed to break out after her speeches. During a strike in Charleston, West Virginia, she urged miners' wives and children to protect themselves. How? "Buy every gun in Charleston," she advised.

She was not easily discouraged. Barred from crossing mine property or from renting meeting halls, she waded up streams to get to miners or held rallies on public roads. The terrain of West Virginia made organizing particularly difficult since miners often lived in isolated towns owned by the coal mining companies. But in that state alone, she participated in five major strikes over forty years.

Mother Jones also campaigned among coal miners in Colorado. In 1902 she led a strike by sixteen thousand coal miners throughout the state. But mine union leader John L. Lewis (1880–1969) decided to concentrate on another strike in eastern Pennsylvania, and called off the strike in Colorado. Mother Jones was furious. She denounced Lewis and left the United Mine Workers, staying away for the next nine years.

After Colorado, Mother Jones seemed to turn up everywhere. She supported striking machinists at the Southern Pacific Railroad. She supported copper miners in Arizona, and while there took on the cause of Mexican revolutionaries who had been imprisoned in the United States. On their behalf she met President William Howard Taft (1857–1930), after which a congressional committee was formed to investigate the matter.

In 1911 she rejoined the United Mine Workers and was again active in organizing miners in West Virginia. During a strike in 1912, she spoke out in a series of meetings. A military court accused her of conspiracy to commit murder after it was rumored that she planned to attack the governor during a march on the state capital. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison. (Her sentence was later set aside, but the incident was a measure of fear inspired in authorities by a woman who was by then eighty years old.)

From 1913 to 1915, Mother Jones again led strikes in Colorado, at coal mines owned by John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937; see entry). State authorities tried every possible tactic to keep her away. She was ordered quarantined (removed from the general population so as not to spread disease) on the false grounds of having been exposed to smallpox. She was escorted out of Colorado by the state militia (now called the National Guard), but she sneaked back in and led a march of two thousand union delegates to the state capital. Arrested again in Trinidad, Colorado, she was held in a hospital for nine weeks, then in the cellar of a courthouse in Walsenburg, Colorado, where she threw bottles at rats that invaded her cell during the night.

In return for her support of Mexican revolutionaries a few years earlier, the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa (1878–1923) contacted President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) in an appeal for her release.

Children's crusade

The plight of children working in mines and factories had long been a central concern for Mother Jones. At the time, children as young as six were employed doing dangerous and unhealthy work, often for as long as sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for very low wages. The children of poor workers had no formal schooling, and there were few restrictions on how long they could be forced to work, or under what conditions.

The Ludlow Massacre

During the Colorado miners' campaign, striking miners near Ludlow, Colorado, had been evicted from their company-owned homes and were living in tents. At ten o'clock on the morning of April 20, 1914, a combined force of state militiamen and private guards from the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency surrounded the large group of tents. Gunfire broke out—each side blamed the other for shooting first—between the guards, armed with a machinegun mounted on an armored car, and miners armed with rifles. Afterward, the private guards set fire to the tents, in the process suffocating some women and children who had crawled into pits for protection from the gunfire.

In the end, twenty people, including twelve women and children, were dead. The event came to be known as the Ludlow massacre, and the mine owner, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937; see entry), was blamed by many labor leaders for murdering innocent people in order to defeat the union.

Nevertheless, the next year Mother Jones encountered Rockefeller in New York City and was invited to his office. Afterward, she said "I don't hold the boy responsible," which outraged many of her fellow radicals.

In the summer of 1903, Mother Jones, at age seventy-three, led a march from Kensington, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, to Oyster Bay, New York, the home of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; see entry). The route was about 130 miles. She headed up an army of textile workers, half of them under sixteen, most of them dressed in rags and many with missing fingers as a result of injuries sustained from tiring, long days working at automated looms. They were a small fraction of the estimated two million children employed in factories, mines, and mills in the United States at the time. The labor agitator who looked like she could be the grandmother of the children marching with her was determined to confront President Roosevelt at his home in a campaign to establish child labor laws.

New York Senator Thomas Platt (1833–1910) was also on the marchers' list of people to see, but when he heard that Mother Jones was on her way, he reportedly dashed out the back door of his hotel and jumped onto a passing trolley. President Roosevelt told the Secret Service, whose job it was to guard the president, to keep the marchers away, but Mother Jones dressed three mill boys in fancy clothing and approached Roosevelt's house posed as ordinary tourists. The president turned them away from his door, saying he could do nothing.

Nevertheless, Mother Jones's march succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of children and raised a national outcry. Soon afterward, state legislatures began passing laws to protect children and to take steps to enforce laws that were already on the books.

Now she sleeps

Jones remained active in the labor cause right up until her death in 1930, although once she reached her nineties, age slowed her down significantly. In her last years, she lived with a friend in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

When she died, at the age of one hundred, Mother Jones was buried as she had asked: at the Miner's Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, just northeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Her grave is next to those of miners who died in a mine riot in Virden, Illinois, in 1898. "I hope it will be my consolation when I pass away," she had said, in a document filed with the county government in 1924, "to feel I sleep under the clay with those brave boys."

In 1936 a granite monument was erected in the cemetery. A crowd of fifty thousand people attended a ceremony to honor the memory of Mother Jones. On her tombstone were carved the words: "She gave her life to the world of labor, her blessed soul to heaven. God's finger touches her, and now she sleeps."

Mother Jones was a powerful force in righting the wrongs of the Industrial Revolution and standing up for workers. Because of her lifelong struggle and fighting spirit, this "grandmother of agitators" has attained mythic status in the American historical consciousness.

For More Information

Books

Currie, Stephen. We Have Marched Together: The Working Children's Crusade. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications Co., 1997.

Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Jones, Mary Harris. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Chicago, IL: C. H. Kerr, 1972.

Whitman, Alden, ed. American Reformers. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1985.

Periodicals

Gorn, Elliott J. "Mother Jones: The Woman." Mother Jones, May 2001, p. 58.

Gustaitis, Joseph. "Mary Harris Jones: 'The Most Dangerous Woman in America.'" American History Illustrated, January 1988, p. 22.

Web Sites

Hawse, Mara Lou. "Mother Jones: The Miners's Angel." Illinois Labor History Society.http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/majones.htm (accessed on February 13, 2003).

Jones, Mary Harris. "The Autobiography of Mother Jones." MotherJones. com. http://www.motherjones.com/about_us/MJbio.pdf (accessed on February 13, 2003).