Jones, Mary Harris (1830–1930)

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Jones, Mary Harris (1830–1930)

Organizer for the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers of America who struggled to obtain better working and living conditions for workers and their families. Name variations: Mother Jones. Born Mary Harris on May 1, 1830 (some sources cite 1843) in Cork County, Ireland; died in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 30, 1930; daughter of Richard and Mary Harris; attended public school in Toronto and one year of normal school; married George Jones (a molder), in 1861; children: four.

Immigrated to Toronto (1841); became private tutor in Maine (1855); taught at St. Mary's Convent, Monroe, Michigan (1859); moved to Memphis, Tennessee (1860); lost husband and children to yellow fever epidemic (1867); moved to Chicago and became first woman organizer for the Knights of Labor (1871); was field organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (1900); led march of mill children (1903); helped found Industrial Workers of the World (1905); participated in strikes nationwide (1877–1923).

Selected publications:

magazine articles for International Socialist Review (beginning 1900); Autobiography of Mother Jones (Charles Kerr, 1925).

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mary Harris Jones traveled thousands of miles throughout the United States, going wherever she was needed in the struggle to obtain decent wages and working conditions for American workers. "My address is like my shoes," she said. "It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong." Present at a coal mining strike when a mine detective bashed in the skull of a miner, Jones cradled the head of the man as he lay dying. In his delirium, the miner thought that she was his mother; from that time on, the name "Mother" Jones stuck.

Mary Harris was born in Cork County, Ireland, probably on May 1, 1830 (the year is in dispute), the daughter of Richard and Mary Harris . Little is known about Mary's childhood. In her autobiography, her first 30 years are relegated to two paragraphs. In 1835, Richard Harris left Ireland to work on railway construction gangs in the U.S. and Canada; six years later, in 1841, he brought his family to America. They settled in Toronto, where Mary attended the Toronto Middle School for one year. The journeys that were to continue for the rest of her life began in 1855, when she left Toronto for a job in Maine as a private tutor. In 1859, she taught school at St. Mary's Convent in Monroe, Michigan, where she earned $8 per month, but she did not like the work of "bossing little children." She moved to Chicago, where she earned a living as a seamstress, until she left there for Memphis, Tennessee, in 1860. The following year, she married George Jones, a molder who also worked as a union organizer. Their first child was born in 1862; three others followed in quick succession.

At times, Mary Jones managed to travel with George on his union organizing trips, until 1867, when tragedy struck. Jones lost her husband and all four children to a yellow fever epidemic that hit Memphis. She remained there, nursing others, until the epidemic abated, then returned to Chicago where she worked again as a seamstress.

Misfortune seemed to follow Mary Harris Jones, however, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed her shop and home. This calamity changed the course of her life. Since her return to Chicago, Jones had learned of the work of the Knights of Labor to help workers, and, even though women were not to gain membership in the union until 1879, she went to work for the group as an organizer in 1871. It was during this time that she made the acquaintance of Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights in 1878; he would remain her lifelong friend.

Thus began Mary Harris Jones' long journey, a journey that would take her wherever workers fought for their rights. She would participate in strikes throughout the country, including the Baltimore and Ohio strike of railroad workers in Pittsburgh (1877); the Pullman railroad strike in Birmingham, Alabama (1894); the Pennsylvania anthracite coal miners' strike (1902); the Ludlow strike in Colorado (1913); and the nationwide steel strike (1919). In 1886, Jones left the Knights of Labor and became a field organizer for a new union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). By 1904, when she was in her 70s, she would be earning $4 per day for her efforts.

Mother Jones traveled the coal areas—West Virginia, Alabama and Colorado—that were the hardest to organize, so she understood the life of coal miners. She witnessed the terrible conditions in which the majority of miners and their families lived, in towns where everything—houses, stores, even the churches—was owned by the mine owners. She knew the gruesome hazards of the work beneath the ground, and she developed a reputation for fearlessness in the most intense situations, as well as for her use of salty language. She also knew how to keep up the workers' morale, making her words felt by all who heard her. She went underground in the coal mines to convince scabs, who continued to work when others were out on strike, that they should quit and support their brother workers. She also encouraged the miners to improve their minds and their English by reading.

Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.
—Mary Harris Jones

In her speeches, Jones often made the coal operators and owners the butt of her jokes. She warned the miners repeatedly against trusting the churches in their communities that were supported financially by the coal owners. In one case, when a local justice of the peace upbraided her for holding a union meeting in a "house of God," she retorted, "Oh, that isn't God's house. That is the coal company's house. … God almighty never comes around to a place like this." Although she was a lifelong Roman Catholic, Jones never claimed allegiance to the organized church. She believed that the church had abandoned the revolutionary nature espoused by Jesus Christ and that organized religion was being used as a means of keeping people from asking questions about their condition. In her speeches, she portrayed Christ as an organizer of the poor and someone who chose to die rather than to betray the poor.

Mother Jones had great success organizing the southern West Virginia coal fields in the 1890s. On June 20, 1902, she was the featured speaker at a rally near Clarksburg, West Virginia, but at the end of the speech she was arrested and taken to Parkersburg. When it became evident that she was to be held in the local hotel, she demanded to be held in the jail with the other miners who were being detained. When Mother Jones returned to that state during the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek strikes in 1912, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a military court and served three months of the sentence in solitary confinement before she was released.

Many times Mother Jones was imprisoned or escorted out of town only to return again and again. During the Ludlow strike in Colorado, she was ordered to leave town or face prison, but the threat of imprisonment did not deter her. After being arrested and held in squalid conditions for one month, she was escorted out of town, but she slipped back into town with the help of men working for the railroad. Many an unsuspecting sheriff found Jones back in his town or county because of the help she received from railway workers.

Mother Jones knew that success in organizing a union often depended on the workers' presenting a united front. One way to accomplish this, often ignored by male organizers, was to get the women of the mining community involved in support of the strike. In 1899–1900, Jones told the miners out on strike in Arnot, Pennsylvania, to "stay home with the children for a change and let the women attend to the scabs." She organized a "mop and broom" brigade that traveled from mine to mine to convince scabs not to come to work, and she employed these tactics successfully at many other strike sites. In August 1907 in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, Jones urged the wives of strikers to take their children on the picket line; if they were imprisoned, they were encouraged to sing as loud as they could so that the community would be glad to have them released.

Although the majority of Mother Jones' time was spent fighting for her miners in the coal fields, she did not ignore the needs of other workers. She assisted in the formation of a union of domestic servants, and in 1901 she helped the daughters of miners, working as silk weavers, to win their fight for improved work conditions. In order to assess the situation of child employment in southern cotton mills, Jones traveled throughout the South, hiring on and telling the managers that she had several children who would be coming to work with her. She described a scene typical of what she discovered in a cotton mill in Cottondale, Alabama, where she worked in 1904:

Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching their little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads. They crawled under machinery to oil it. They replaced spindles all day long, all day long; all night through. Tiny babies six years old with faces of sixty, did an eight hour shift for ten cents a day.

These conditions were not found only in the South. In 1903, in order to bring the plight of the mill children to the attention of the nation, Jones had led a group of the young workers in a march from Kensington, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, New York, where she hoped to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt. Though Roosevelt refused to see them, the march was considered responsible for legislation enacted in various states to introduce the regulation of child labor. In 1909, Mother Jones also came to the aid of striking shirtwaist workers, and in 1910 she helped to organize copper miners in Arizona and women bottlers in Milwaukee breweries; in 1916, streetcar workers on strike in El Paso, Texas, and in New York City found her at their sides.

Her non-stop efforts for the workers did not guarantee that she always got along well with union officials. When she resigned as an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, it was because of a falling-out with the union's president, John Mitchell, because she believed he had been bought off and was serving the interests of the owners rather than the miners. She had even less respect for John L. Lewis, who became president of the United Mine Workers of America in 1919. She saw Lewis as a self-promoter and described him as "an empty piece of human slime." She carried this conviction to her deathbed, where she contributed $1,000 toward a campaign to oust Lewis from his position.

Her various political stances reveal Jones' single-minded dedication to the issues of workers' rights. She was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and Eugene V. Debs (even though she did not vote for him when he ran as the Socialist candidate for the senate in Indiana). In 1895, she had gone to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Omaha, Nebraska, to sell subscriptions to the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason. She had attended the founding convention of the Social Democrats of America in June 1897 and had written articles for the International Socialist Review beginning in 1900. In 1897, she visited the utopian socialist colony at Pushkin, Tennessee, but decided not to stay; her beliefs and actions regarding workers' rights were borrowed from too many ideologies for her to be comfortably confined to one.

After her falling-out with Mitchell, Jones became an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners (miners of metals) whose political stance was much more radical than that of the UMWA. The federation sent her as a delegate to participate in founding the new radical industrial union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Though she participated at the initial stage, Jones did not continue her affiliation with the IWW.

Jones was concerned about labor conditions affecting Mexican workers who were coming into the United States, and she traveled throughout the U.S. making speeches about the dictatorial policies of President Porfirio Diaz of Mexico. She supported his overthrow and visited his successor, Francisco Madero, but the relationship was short-lived because of Madero's assassination. Nevertheless, in January 1921 she was invited by the Mexican government to speak at the Third Congress of the Pan American Federation of Labor in Mexico City.

Though her political stance was radical, and her economic ideas regarding workers were anticapitalistic, her labor concerns put her on the conservative side of some issues. For instance, she was adamantly opposed to women's suffrage. Jones was action-oriented and did not believe in politicians or the power of the ballot box. She saw suffrage as supporting inaction, pointing out that women in Colorado had the vote but that had not kept the Ludlow Massacre from occurring. According to Jones, women needed to "realize [that with] what they have in their hands there is no limit to what they could accomplish. The trouble is they let the capitalists make them believe they wouldn't be ladylike." She also opposed the temperance movement, on the grounds that company owners used Prohibition to develop a more efficient work force by taking away one of the only means of escape available to the workers.

Mother Jones continued her work until she was well into her 80s. In 1924, when she could no longer travel, she went to live with her friend Terence Powderly at his home near Washington, D.C.; that same year, she began her autobiography. The book, edited by Margaret F. Parton , was published in 1925. The last years of her life were spent with a retired coal miner and his wife, Walter and Lillie May Burgess , in Silver Spring, Maryland. On May 1, 1930, although Jones was in poor health, she celebrated her 100th birthday, chatting with friends and appearing in a newsreel. Among the telegrams she received from around the world, her favorite was from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: "Please accept my heartiest congratulations on your 100th birthday anniversary. Your loyalty to your ideals, your fearless adherence to your duty as you have seen it is an inspiration to all who have known you."

Mary Harris Jones died on November 30, 1930. A requiem mass was said for her at St. Gabriel's in Washington, D.C., and then her body was sent, at her request, to Mt. Olive, Illinois, for burial at the cemetery that honored the miners killed at the Virden, Illinois, riot of 1898. Survivors of the Virden riot escorted the casket to the Odd Fellows Temple where thousands paid tribute, and the services held at Ascension Church were broadcast over labor radio station WCFL. The Reverend John W.F. Maguire, president of St. Viator's College, in Bourbonnais, Illinois, delivered the memorial address to a crowd of 10,000–15,000: "Wealthy coal operators and capitalists throughout the United States are breathing sighs of relief while toil-worn men and women are weeping tears of bitter grief. The reason for this contrast of relief and sorrow is apparent. Mother Jones is dead." The services were concluded at the cemetery, where a small stone was placed over the grave.

In 1934, the Progressive Miners of America (PMA), owners of the cemetery, began soliciting funds for a monument to mark the grave of Mother Mary Jones. The PMA, along with its women's auxiliaries, collected $16,399.25, and the monument was dedicated on October 11, 1936. The shaft of pink granite stands 22 feet high on a base flanked by bronze statues of two miners. A bas-relief of Jones at the center of the obelisk, and five plaques at the base, commemorate Mother Jones and the four men who died at Virden: General Alexander Bradley, Joseph Getterle, E. Kaemmerer, and E.W. Smith. Other plaques bear the names of the "Martyrs of the Progressive Miners of America."

On the day of the dedication, cars, trucks, chartered buses, and trains brought thousands of miners to Mt. Olive. Senator Rush D. Holt of West Virginia, Congressional Representative William Lemke of North Dakota, and Duncan McDonald, a socialist leader, were among the speakers, all of whom decried the leadership of John L. Lewis as well as the government's handling of the Depression, then in full swing. They spoke with admiration and love about the woman buried there, who had dedicated her life to bettering conditions for workers. The final speaker was Lillie May Burgess, with whom Mother Jones had lived during her last years. Burgess told her listeners that Mother Jones wanted to "live another hundred years in order to fight to the end" so "that there would be no more machine guns and no more sobbing of little children."