Jones, Mary Harris

JONES, MARY HARRIS

Mary "Mother" Jones (1830–1930) is one of the great legends of American progressive politics. After losing her own family to yellow fever, Mary Jones found in the lives of the downtrodden a new family to nurture and support. She did this for seventy years as a trade union organizer, a feminist, and a campaigner against child labor in America.

"Mother Jones" was born in 1830, near Dublin, Ireland to parents who were eager to emigrate. When Mary was five years old, her father came to America, where he went to work building canals and railroads, a job similar to the one he had held in Ireland. Once he became a naturalized American citizen around 1840, he sent for his wife and daughter.

The family first settled in Toronto, Canada, where Mary's father was working on one of the first Canadian railroads. They later moved to Michigan. Mary was an excellent student and she graduated with high honors from high school. She became a teacher at a Catholic school in Monroe, Michigan, soon after graduation.

She moved to Chicago to explore the possibilities of becoming a professional dressmaker, but, at age 30, returned to teaching, this time in Memphis, Tennessee. There she met and married Robert Jones, an iron worker who was an enthusiastic member of the Iron Moulder's Union. During the first four years of their marriage they had four children. Work was plentiful in Tennessee, and for a time the family enjoyed a modest prosperity. But in 1867 a sudden yellow fever epidemic swept through Memphis, taking the lives of Mary's husband and all of her children. At 37, Mary Jones's life was devastated and she was completely on her own.

She returned to Chicago and worked as a dressmaker, but her bad luck continued when her dressmaking business was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Homeless and penniless, she turned to her deceased husband's fellow union members for help. Their compassion towards her touched her heart. She felt that the union had saved her life. From that time on, she pursued union organizing with an astonishing enthusiasm that made her an American legend.

Mary Jones began working as a union activist with the Knights of Labor. This union was founded in 1869 in an attempt to unite all workers under a single organization. Mary discovered she had a real talent for inspiring others with her speeches. The Knights of Labor often sent her to particularly tense spots during strikes. She could inspire workers to stay with the union during the hard days of labor action, when there was neither work nor money.

Joining strikers in the coal mines of Pennsylvania in 1873, she witnessed conditions bordering on slavery and children near starvation. Her own Irish heritage caused her to work passionately on behalf of the mostly Irish workers. It was her kindly, protective concern for the workers in the Pennsylvania coal mines that earned her the nickname "Mother Jones."

Mother Jones moved from strike to strike. In 1877 she was involved in the nationwide walkout for better conditions for railroad workers. In 1880 she was in Chicago on behalf of workers trying to obtain an eight-hour day. She also took part in the strike at the McCormick-Harvester works, where a bomb killed several policemen and police fired randomly into a crowd of union workers, killing 11 people and wounding dozens of others.

In her 60s Mother Jones became an organizer for the United Mine Workers Union. Since judges were reluctant to jail such an elderly woman, her age was an asset to the union movement. As she grew older, her attention focused on securing laws that prohibited child labor. She made speeches and engaged newspaper writers to accompany her to places where children were working in slave-like conditions. She also became active in the movement to obtain the right of women to vote.

During the final years of her life, Jones continued to move around the country, giving fiery speeches and organizing workers. She was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1898 and of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. She helped to organize the coal fields of Pennsylvania in 1899. At age 82 she was arrested during a violent strike in West Virginia and sentenced to 20 years in jail. Public outcry was so loud that she was pardoned by the governor and released. She then went on to spend six days in Michigan's Copper Country in August 1913, supporting a copper miners' strike. A woman of astonishing vigor, she marched three blocks in a miners' parade at age 83. In her 90s, she returned to Chicago to work at organizing dressmakers.

On her 100th birthday Mother Jones was asked to speak on the radio about her experiences. She spoke long and well, denouncing the exploitation by business of the American worker and urging all her listeners to organize to transform an unjust society that had fallen into a great Depression. Unchanged by time and full of passion for justice for the American worker, Mother Jones died in Silver Springs, Maryland, in 1930. She became a legend in her lifetime.

See also: Chicago Fire of 1871, Industrial Workers of the World, Knights of Labor, Labor Movement, United Mine Workers

FURTHER READING

Fetherling, Dale. Mother Jones, Miner's Angel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

Mooney, Fred. Struggle in the Coal Fields. Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1967.

Jones, Mary Harris. Autobiography of Mother Jones. Mary Parton, ed. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925.

——. Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Speeches and Writings. Philip S. Foner, ed. New York: Monad Press, 1983.

——. The Correspondence of Mother Jones. Edward Steel, ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.

Werstein, Irving. Labor's Defiant Lady: The Story of Mother Jones. New York: Thomas Crowell Press, 1969.