Mary "Mother" Jones

Born May 1, 1830

County Cork, Ireland

Died November 30, 1930

Silver Spring, Maryland

Fierce advocate for the rights of working people, especially coal miners

"Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living."

L ike many immigrants to the United States, Mary Harris Jones led a hard life. She experienced the economic hardships that were common to factory workers in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it was as a campaigner for coal miners that she gained her nickname, Mother Jones, and a national reputation for making trouble for mine owners. Jones was symbolic of the struggle waged by workers to achieve better lives in the face of unyielding opposition by business. Her willingness to fight against the wealthy class was an attitude that she brought with her from her native Ireland.

The spirit of a rebel

Mary Harris Jones was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, the daughter of Richard and Mary Harris, on May 1, 1830. But although that was the date she gave in her autobiography, she may have altered her birthday to coincide with the date marking the anniversary of a riot in Chicago that pitted the police against workers who were on strike, or refusing to work until their employer met their demands, for an eight-hour work day. One of Jones's biographers, Elliot Gorn, insists that she was born on August 1, 1837, and that by claiming May 1 as her birthday, she meant to add to her image as the mother of union organizers. What does not seem in dispute is that her father's family had long been campaigners for the rights of Irish people while Ireland was ruled by the English, and when many Irish farmers led a poor, miserable existence working for English landlords. In 1835, Richard Harris was forced to flee Ireland to Canada, to escape arrest for his political activities. Three years later, he brought his family to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he worked as a laborer on the railroad.

Mary Harris Jones had an ordinary childhood, attending public school and graduating from high school at age seventeen. She found a job as a teacher at a Catholic school in Monroe, Michigan. In the 1850s, the United States did not restrict immigration, and it was easy to move from Canada, or from other countries, to find work in the United States. Harris Jones disliked the strict atmosphere in the Catholic school and decided to move to Chicago. She found work as a seamstress, sewing clothes, curtains, and furniture coverings for the city's wealthy families. But it was hard to make an adequate living as a seamstress, and in 1861 Harris Jones decided to resume her career as a teacher.

Harris Jones moved to Memphis, Tennessee, after hearing about teaching jobs there. She began work in the fall. In Memphis, she met George Jones, an iron worker who also spent much of his time trying to persuade his fellow workers to join a labor union. Many workers thought they could improve their lives by joining together; members of a labor union then negotiated with employers as a group for higher wages and better conditions. If employers refused, the workers threatened to strike.

Jones and Harris Jones were married in the summer of 1861 and eventually had four children. Mary Harris Jones taught school, and her husband became a full-time organizer for his union. His position drew Mary Harris Jones close to the labor movement, which was just getting started in the United States as new industrial enterprises employed increasing numbers of workers. Then, in 1867, disaster struck. Yellow fever, a disease carried by mosquitoes and for which no cure was known, struck Mary Jones's family. One by one, all four of her children, and then her husband, died from the disease in the space of a few months.

Mary Jones returned to Chicago and resumed her work as a seamstress. In 1871, just four years after losing her family to yellow fever, a large fire swept whole neighborhoods in Chicago, destroying Jones's modest business. In the chaos that followed the event, still known as the Great Fire, Jones tried to help other victims, while noticing that her wealthy customers did not seem to care what happened to people living in poor neighborhoods. At the same time, Jones began attending meetings organized by the Knights of Labor, an early labor union trying to organize workers in Chicago's fast-growing factories. Many of the workers in Chicago were, like Jones, immigrants who had come to the United States looking for better lives. Some of the immigrants had been recruited in Europe to fight in the U.S. Army during the American Civil War (1861–65). After the war, they drifted to Chicago and other large cities looking for work. By listening to speakers at Knights of Labor meetings, Jones developed a talent for delivering fiery speeches of her own on behalf of the labor union, combining a sharp tongue with an image of a middle-aged mother campaigning for social justice. Soon, she began working full-time for the Knights of Labor, giving up her dressmaking work for the vocation that would make her name a household word over the next six decades.

Life as an organizer

The period of Jones's life as a labor organizer coincided with the period of mass immigration to the United States. Millions of Europeans, especially from southern and eastern Europe, flowed into the United States, seeking jobs and opportunities during a period of industrial expansion. For most of the period between 1870 and 1920, the United States experienced rapid industrial growth. The opportunity to work attracted millions of Europeans, many of them poor farm laborers, to cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. It was a period when enormous fortunes were built by businessmen like John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) in petroleum, and Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919; see entry in volume 1) in steel manufacturing. It was also a period when millions of Americans worked for very low wages and lived in tiny quarters—whole families were often jammed into one or two rooms in urban apartment houses that lacked fresh air and indoor plumbing. These conditions gave rise to efforts by workers to improve their conditions, by joining labor unions or by supporting political reforms that promised to halt the powers of business owners and even to take over businesses to be run by the government.

Jones was often in the midst of the most vicious, even violent, struggles between workers and company owners who strongly resisted efforts by their workers to demand higher wages. For most of her career as a labor organizer, Jones was most closely associated with the United Mineworkers Union, which represented coal miners. Coal was the principal source of energy that provided power to industrial enterprises. The coal was either burned directly to fuel steam engines (the coal heated water to create steam, which instantly expanded, driving machinery such as railroad locomotives) or burned to generate electricity. Coal miners were, as a group, strong men who did not shy away from violence if they were confronted by force. At the same time, coal miners typically lived in "company towns," in shacks built by mine owners to house their workers near the mines. Miners were often paid in "script," a form of money that could only be spent in company-owned stores, where mine owners could charge workers whatever high prices they wanted.

Starting in 1874 and lasting fifty years, Jones was often found at the site of the longest, most bitter labor conflicts involving miners. Among the highlights of her career:

• 1874: Jones was sent by the Knights of Labor to Pennsylvania, where coal miners were on strike for over a year. There, Jones found that workers' families, living without pay, were living in misery, unable to buy food and other goods at company stores. Jones focused her attention on keeping up morale. It was during this strike that Mary Jones got the nickname "Mother Jones." Among striking miners were Irish immigrants organized into a secret group called the Molly Maguires, who sometimes resorted to violence to achieve their goals. The Molly Maguires were infiltrated, or secretly joined, by company agents, and several members were arrested, charged with murder, and executed. Fear of company police agents was another obstacle that union organizers had to overcome.

• 1877: A national railroad strike centered in Pittsburgh resulted in U.S. president Rutherford Hayes (1822–1893; served 1877–81) calling out troops to protect railroad property—or to support the railroad owners, in the view of labor sympathizers. Jones was in Pittsburgh to support the strikers and their families.
• 1886: In May 1886, during a labor rally held at Haymarket Square in Chicago to support a strike against the McCormick-Harvester Company, a bomb exploded, killing several policemen. The police in turn fired guns into the crowd, killing eleven. Jones attended the rally but was not present during the violence. Eight anarchists, or people who believe in replacing government institutions with voluntary associations of workers, were accused of killing the police, and seven were sentenced to death. Four of the men were later hanged, one killed himself in jail, and the last three were eventually set free by the governor of Illinois. There was little or no evidence that any of the eight had been involved in the bomb that killed the police, and the Haymarket Square incident became a symbol of injustice for the labor movement.
• 1891–1903: Jones became an organizer for the United Mine Workers Union, working among coal miners in Pennsylvania. Jones, sometimes in disguise, toured the mining area to organize workers and sometimes organized miners' wives to help patrol mine entrances and discourage strike breakers. Jones often favored a tougher negotiating position than the president of the union, John Mitchell (1870–1919). Jones resigned from the United Mine Workers in 1903 after the union agreed to settle a coal strike in Colorado that gave white miners in one location what they wanted but gave nothing to Spanish-speaking miners at another location. Jones's stand on behalf of Mexican miners made Jones a labor heroine in Mexico, where she became known as Madre Yones ("Mother Jones," in Spanish).
• 1903: Jones led a march of four hundred children, many of them crippled by industrial accidents, from Philadelphia to New York to publicize the need for limitations on employing children in factories. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–1909) refused to meet Jones at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, on Long Island, but the march attracted tremendous publicity for the cause of child laborers. In a letter to Roosevelt published in newspapers, Jones told the president: "These little children, raked by cruel toil beneath the iron wheels of greed, are starving in this country which you have declared is in the height of prosperity—slaughtered, ten hours a day, every day in the week, every week in the month, every month in the year, that our manufacturing aristocracy [ruling class] may live to exploit more slaves as the years roll by." The next year, the Pennsylvania legislature passed regulations to protect the health and welfare of children working in factories.
• 1912: Back with the United Mine Workers after the resignation of Mitchell, Jones was arrested during a West Virginia strike and sentenced to twenty years in prison by a military judge. Later, evidence showed Jones was carried onto property controlled by the military during the strike, and she was pardoned by the governor of West Virginia.

• 1913: During another coal strike near Ludlow, Colorado, Jones, by now over eighty years old, was arrested and held in the basement of the courthouse without being charged. Troops guarding the mine and trying to clear away families of strikers shot and killed two women and eleven children, resulting in a public-relations disaster for the mine's owner, John D. Rockefeller, and freedom for Mother Jones.

Despite her advancing age, Jones continued to be an active voice in the American labor movement. She supported striking subway workers in New York City in 1915 and 1916 and striking steelworkers in 1919 and 1920, when she was ninety. Her autobiography, published in 1925, showed that even at age ninety-five, she had lost none of her passion for social justice. At the age of one hundred, in 1930, she went on the radio to call on working people to continue their struggle for social and economic justice.

Mother Jones as a symbol

A demure, grandmotherly woman on the outside, Irish immigrant Mary "Mother" Jones was a fierce, effective campaigner for the rights of working people, especially coal miners, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through her work, she symbolized the struggle waged by workers, many of them immigrants, to achieve economic well-being and security. It may be that her own birthday was changed, in her writing, to add to the symbolism. Her white hair, her prim, modest appearance covered an underlying passionate personality determined to fight for higher pay, shorter hours, and safer working conditions on behalf of working men, especially miners, and their families.

When her father had brought young Mary Harris to North America as an immigrant, he also brought a tradition of resistance against economic power that mistreated workers, whether it was held by English landlords or American business owners. It was a tradition that lived a century. Mary Harris Jones died on November 30, 1930, just past her one hundredth birthday.

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Currie, Stephen. We Have Marched Together: The Working Children's Crusade. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 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: 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' Angel." Illinois Labor History Society.http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/majones.htm (accessed on March 17, 2004).

Jones, Mary Harris. "Mother Jones: The Woman." MotherJones.com.http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/2001/05/motherjones_gorn.html (accessed on March 17, 2004).