Few people today remember Mary Harris Jones. The Irish-born daughter of Catholic tenant farmers, Mother Jones, witnessed famine, survived an epidemic, lost everything again to fire, and in 1902 an attorney named her “the most dangerous woman in America.” She endured personal attacks, hardships, banishment, and imprisonment for her cause. She battled corporate presidents and politicians, and championed impoverished workers and children exploited as cheap labor. She assumed the role of Mother Jones, but her passion for the plight of America’s working class filled her with blunt and fiery speeches and the conviction to suffer for her cause.
Early Life
Born in the city of Cork, Ireland, to Richard Harris and Ellen (née Cotter) Harris. Mary’s exact birthdate is undocumented. She claimed May 1, 1830, was her birthdate. She was baptized on August 1, 1837.
Her father came to America in 1835. In America, he worked as a laborer with railway construction crews and sent for his family as soon as he became an American citizen. Most resources state Mary left Ireland when she was barely ten years old.
When she was a teenager, her father’s work took him to Toronto, so the family immigrated to Canada. Their immigrant status, their Catholic faith, and their Irish heritage meant they suffered a lot of discrimination.
Her parents, however, established a stable, working class home. Mary earned a stipend of one dollar per week for every semester completed at Toronto Normal School. She learned the skills of dressmaking and received training to become a teacher. She did not finish her schooling.
Early Career
A convent in Monroe, Michigan, hired her for a teaching position. She started teaching on August 31, 1859, for eight dollars per month. She was 23. But the school was a depressing place.
She moved to Chicago and opened a dressmaking shop.
“I preferred sewing to bossing little children.” – The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Mother Jones
She went back to teaching, this time in Memphis.
Marriage & Family
In Memphis, she met and married George E. Jones in 1861. George was a member and organizer of the National Union of Iron Moulders (which became the International Molders and Foundry Workers Union of North America). He made a good living, so she settled into married life.
An epidemic of yellow fever and cholera swept through Memphis in 1867. Schools and churches closed. Only people with permits could enter the homes of yellow fever victims. The epidemic claimed more of the lives of the poor and the workers than anyone else. The rich and well-to-do fled the city.
The dead surrounded Mary and her family. In her autobiography, she states that there were ten people dead from yellow fever across the street from her.
One by one, the illness claimed the lives of Mary’s four children under the age of five (three girls and a boy), then it claimed her husband’s life as well. Mary was thirty.
No neighbor or friend could come to comfort her. The illness struck every home.
After the union buried her husband, she got a permit to nurse the sick, which she did until the end of the epidemic.
One source claimed Mary wore only black from then on.
Life after Loss
Mary moved back to Chicago, where she worked in the commercial dressmaking business. She even opened her own shop on Washington Street near the lake. She worked for the aristocrats of Chicago.
“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.” – The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Mother Jones
She often spent evenings listening to speakers at meeting of the Knights of Labor (a local labor organization).
A mere four years after losing her husband and children, she lost her home, her shop, and all her possessions in the Great Chicago Fire (1871). The fire made thousands homeless, including Mary. After about twenty-four hours of staying near the lake, she learned the Old St. Mary’s church at Wabash Avenue and Peck Court had opened to the refugees. She lived there until she could find other housing.
After the fire, Mary (along with thousands) helped rebuild the city and learned more about the labor struggle of the new industrial age. Soon after that, she realized she wanted to work to better the conditions under which the poor worked and lived and became a member of the Knights of Labor.
Mary moved from town to town, a sought-after speaker who told powerful stories of the suffering and needs of the workers. Her stories were effective at getting people to sign up for unions.
She wore a black dress with a lace collar and a black hat. It gave her a motherly air which allowed her more freedom than most of her peers.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Strike
In the 1870s, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees went on strike and asked Mary, known for her speaking and organizational skills, to help them. She went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to help.
The railroads had a law passed that in case of a railroad workers’ strike, all locomotives had to be brought to the roundhouse before the strike could begin. Mary reports the strikers followed this law.
One night during the strike, a riot broke out. They soaked hundreds of boxcars in oil, set them on fire, and sent them down the tracks to the roundhouse. The fire destroyed more than one hundred locomotives belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. They charged the strikers with arson and rioting, though Mary claimed hoodlums, backed by businessmen in Pittsburgh, started the fire.
“Then and there I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others’ sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.” – The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Mother Jones
The Haymarket Affair of 1886
From 1880 onward, Mary was deeply involved with the labor movement. She crisscrossed the country, speaking and organizing where she could. She used curse words and stories about the injured and dead, and called out the businessmen who exploited their workers.
In October 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour workday would become standard.
On Saturday, May 1, somewhere between 300,000 and half-a-million workers went on strike to reduce their 10-16 hour workdays to an 8-hour workday.
On May 3, 1886, a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square, near a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant in Chicago, started out peacefully. The rally was in support the striking workers. When the end of day bell rang, the strikers surged to confront strike breakers at the gate. Police fired into the crowd, killing at least two people; some newspapers reported six dead.
Outraged by the violence, some organized another rally for the next day.
On May 4, 1886, a light rain fell. August Spies, Albert Parsons, and the Rev. Samuel Fielden spoke to a crowd of somewhere between 600 to 3,000 people. Many on-duty police officers watched.
The crowd listened to the speakers calmly.
Around 1030 pm, police marched in formation to the speakers and ordered the crowd to disperse. An unidentified person threw a homemade fragmentation bomb at the police. The blast and the subsequent gunfire by the police killed seven police officers and four civilians, and wounded dozens.
Harsh anti-union sentiment divided the city. The Knights of Labor organization ceased to exist. Mary became involved with the United Mine Workers but went anywhere she believed she could help.
Activist
Mary had no permanent residence. She helped striking garment workers in Chicago, unemployed men in Kansas City organizing a march to DC, bottle washers in Milwaukee breweries, Pittsburgh steelworkers, El Paso streetcar operators, Calumet copper miners in Michigan, and the miners in Colorado.
She spoke out against low pay, 12-hour days, the servitude of company stores and company housing, and the horrifying injury and mortality rates.
Mary organized more than the strikers. She helped African Americans, women, and children, often organizing workers’ wives into “mop and broom brigades” to sweep away injustices.
The first printed reference to Mary as Mother Jones appeared in 1897. By that time, she called the male workers she helped as “her boys.”
She published The New Right in 1899 and a two-volume book called Letter of Love and Labor in 1900 and 1901.
In 1902, they tried her for ignoring an injunction banning meetings by striking miners. During her trial, West Virginian district attorney, Reese Blizzard, called her “the most dangerous woman in America.”
It’s believed that Mother Jones also coined her phrase “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” in 1902.
In 1903, she led children in “the March of the Mill Children” from the textile mills of Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island home.
She was arrested more times than any other union leader of the time. Towns and cities banished her. In 1912, she was charged with conspiracy to commit murder by a military tribunal in West Virginia. National attention forced the governor to step in and release her.
Later Years
Mary continued speaking to workers and organizing strikes into the 1920s. Although rheumatism made her unable to hold a pen, she appeared at her last strike in Chicago in 1924 to support striking dressmakers.
Mary spent her final years living with friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland.
Her autobiography, The Autobiography of Mother Jones, was published in 1925.
Death
Mary died of natural causes on November 30, 1930 at the Burgess farm. They held her funeral Mass at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. They buried her in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside “her boys,” miners killed in strike-related violence during the 1898 Battle of Virden.
Legacy
In 1936, miners purchased eighty tons of Minnesota pink granite, with bronze statues of two miners framing a twenty-foot monolith featuring a bas-relief of Mother Jones in the center. On Miners’ Day, October 11, 1936, about 50,000 people arrived to see the new memorial. Ever since then, they celebrate Miners’ Day and Mother Jones Day on October 11.
The site of the former farm where Mother Jones died has a Maryland Historical Trust marker. Nearby is an elementary school named in her honor.
Mother Jones magazine (MOJO), started as a nonprofit investigative magazine in 1976, was named after Mary.
She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984.
- In 2019, they inducted Mother Jones into the National Mining Hall of Fame.
- There are many songs and plays that mention or pay tribute to Mother Jones.
- There are markers in various locations in honor of Mother Jones.
Miners and their wives continue to commemorate and honor and quote Mother Jones to this day.
A Champion
Mother Jones was a passionate champion for the working class. She was not in favor of women’s suffrage saying, “you don’t need the vote to raise hell!” In fact, she was not in favor in any of the other activist causes in her time because she believed it was more important to advocate for the working class. When she was accused of being anti-women’s rights she said, “I’m not an anti to anything which brings freedom to my class.”
Mary Harris Jones didn’t see age, sex, or race. She saw the appalling abuses of workers in America and she fought to change it for all.
If you liked learning about the history of this strong woman, check out these posts.
References
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO): History
Gorn, Elliot J., Mother Jones, 05/2001
Indiana State Governement: historical markers
Jones, Mother,The Autobiography of Mother Jones. (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1925). Copyright not renewed.
Michals, Debra. “Mary Harris ‘Mother Jones.'” National Women’s History Museum. 2015.
Image Credits: