The most dangerous woman in America: Labor activist Mary G. Harris "Mother" Jones

"I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please."

Born in about 1830 in Cork, Ireland, Mary G. Harris would become one of the most powerful labor organizers in the United States. Her family emigrated when she was about ten to escape the potato famine, along with millions of others. Life was hard as immigrants, but much better than as a starving farm family in Ireland. Her father obtained work as a railway laborer and she was educated in Toronto. Her first job was as a teacher in Michigan but decided to go to Chicago to work as a seamstress because "I preferred sewing to bossing little children." However a teaching opportunity was offered in Memphis and she decided to take it.

It was in Memphis that she met and married her husband, George Jones.  He worked in one of the iron foundries in the city and was an organizer of the National Union of Iron Moulders.  They had four children.  Unfortunately tragedy would strike her family.  "In 1867, a fever epidemic swept Memphis. Its victims were mainly among the poor and the workers. The rich and the well-to-do fled the city. Schools and churches were closed. People were not permitted to enter the house of a yellow fever victim without permits. The poor could not afford nurses. Across the street from me, ten persons lay dead from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the wheels of the death cart.  After the union had buried my husband, I got a permit to nurse the sufferers. This I did until the plague was stamped out."

Devastated, she returned to Chicago and set up shop with a partner making dresses for wealthy clients. The contrast between her own life and that of her wealthy clients ignited a spark to improve the lives of all. With the great Chicago fire of 1871 ripped through town, her clients left and she helped her neighbors as best as she could and attended meetings of the Knights of Labor. This was to become her life's calling, helping to organize workers within the Knights of Labor.

By the 1880s labor unions were starting to become much more organized and one of their first pushes was for an eight hour workday. Demands were becoming ever louder and in 1886 Mary Jones was helping the Knights of Labor organize the Chicago area workers to strike for this demand. On May 4, at a rally at Hayward Market, Pastor Samuel Fieldon had just finished speaking moments before dynamite was thrown at police. The surviving police opened fire on the crowd and at the end seven police and four civilians were dead and dozens injured. State officials rounded up several anarchists, only two of which were actually at the rally. Pressure brought to bear on the unions resulted in many unions, including the Knights of Labor, to be disbanded.

Her effectiveness as an organizer and speaker were noticed by other labor organizers, and she found a ready audience in the coalfields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The United Mine Workers had her travel to various mines and she was a frequent leader of strikers picketing and encouraging workers to stay on strike when management brought in scabs and militias. Around this time, she started calling the strikers her boys and they would respond by calling her Mother.

Mine owners hated her and would try to intimidate her by having everyone in the company towns deny her lodging. Workers who bucked their bosses would be evicted, often in the middle of the night on short notice. She was termed "the most dangerous woman in America" by West Virginian district attorney Reese Blizzard in 1902 at her trial for ignoring an injunction banning meetings by striking miners. "There sits the most dangerous woman in America," announced Blizzard. "She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign. She crooks her finger and twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out." Jones wasn't impressed with either the DA or the Judge, saying in a speech to local miners that "while you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers.” Needless to say, Judge Jackson was not happy and warned her forcefully that her utterances were the outgrowth of “the sentiments of those who believe in communism and anarchy.”

Mine workers weren't the only laborers she helped to organize.  In 1901 textile mill workers went on strike in Pennsylvania.  She visited the strikers twice in 1901 but was unable to negotiate much of a payraise.  However, she was struck by the sheer numbers of children working in mills.  This wasn't unusual for the time but the conditions of the textile mills were especially appaling. Many of the children she met during the 1901 strikes at union headquarters were missing fingers and had other disabilities, and she attempted to get newspaper publicity for the bad conditions experienced by children working in Pennsylvania.  However, the mill owners held stock in most newspapers.  When the newspapermen informed her that they could not publish the facts about child labor because of this, she remarked "Well, I've got stock in these little children and I'll arrange a little publicity."  As a result, she organized a march in 1903 between Kensington, Pennsylvania and President Theodore Roosevelt's summer home on Long Island, New York.

Only about 70 children went with her for the 150 mile journey. Three weeks of marching in the summer weather, trying to find places to sleep at night, food to eat, and yet 30,000 people welcomed her group into New York City. Mother Jones became a sensation in New York. Her goal was “public attention on the subject of child labor." She travelled out to Oyster Bay, Long Island with three children and despite the President refusing to meet her or the children as “the President has nothing to do with such matters." However the local New York media covered it extensively. Cartoons satirising the President running away from Mother Jones and the children flourished in the newspapers. While her goal of meeting with the President didn't happen, national attention was finally coming into focus on the issue of child labor. She returned with her group by train back to Pennsylvania. Doubtless the children went back to working over 60 hours per week in the mills.

Despite the lack of meeting with the President, overall the journey was a success in highlighting the brutality of child labor to a national audience.  There was movement in the organization to enact and enforce laws to reduce and make more humane the treatment of children that did continue to work.  

Labor organizer Mother Jones rallying workers in the town of Montgomery in August 1912

During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary Jones arrived in June 1912, speaking and organizing despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners. Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Jones was arrested on February 13, 1913, and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder among other charges, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. During house arrest at Mrs. Carney's Boarding House, she acquired a dangerous case of pneumonia. She did recover and was released after 85 days of confinement. This was likely spurred by Indiana Senator John W. Kern's initiation of a Senate investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines.

Leading Colorado coal miners to the capitol in Denver

Jones helped organize coal miners in Colorado in the 1913–14 United Mine Workers of America strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron company, in what is known as the Colorado Coalfield War. Once again she was arrested, serving time in prison and inside the San Rafael Hospital, and was escorted from the state. Many miners were subsequently killed by the mine owners' private army at the Ludlow Massacre. The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history." Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events. Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. Jones met face-to-face with the owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The meeting was partially responsible for Rockefeller's 1915 visit to the Colorado mines and introduction of long-sought reforms.

Jones continued to work on improving conditions for laborers everywhere, but received criticism for not promoting the right to vote for women.  She replied that she didn't need a vote to raise hell.  While Jones did support the right of women to vote, she felt her true calling was in labor organizer and she continued to work for all laborers, and especially miners, for most of the rest of her life.

Possibly the only footage to capture her speaking, filmed shortly before her death

During her later years, Jones lived with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She celebrated her self-proclaimed 100th birthday there on May 1, 1930, and was filmed making a statement for a newsreel.  Mary Harris Jones died on November 30, 1930, at the Burgess farm.  There was a funeral Mass at St. Gabriel's in Washington, D.C.  She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the 1898 Battle of Virden.   In 1932, about 15,000 Illinois mine workers gathered in Mount Olive to protest against the United Mine Workers, which soon became the Progressive Mine Workers of America.  Convinced that they had acted in the spirit of Mother Jones, the miners decided to place a proper headstone on her grave.  By 1936, the miners had saved up more than $16,000 and were able to purchase "eighty tons of Minnesota pink granite, with bronze statues of two miners flanking a twenty-foot shaft featuring a bas-relief of Mother Jones at its center."  On October 11, 1936, also known as Miners' Day, an estimated 50,000 people arrived at Mother Jones's grave to see the new gravestone and memorial. Since then, October 11 is not only known as Miners' Day but is also referred to and celebrated in Mount Olive as "Mother Jones's Day."

US Department of Labor poster from 2010

Jones' words are still invoked by union supporters more than a century later: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Already known as "the miners' angel" when she was denounced on the floor of the United States Senate as the "grandmother of all agitators", she replied, "I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators. That certainly seems to be true, as exemplified during the bitter 1989–90 Pittston Coal strike in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, the wives and daughters of striking coal miners, inspired by the still-surviving tales of Jones's legendary work among an earlier generation of the region's coal miners, dubbed themselves the "Daughters of Mother Jones". They played a crucial role on the picket lines and in presenting the miners' case to the press and public. A magazine named for her, Mother Jones Magazine, started publication in 1970. And Cork, Ireland proudly celebrates her birthplace and activism every year during Mother Jones Days.