Mother Jones, the labor organizer who worked for economic justice and who mobilized laborers and working class families by her dynamic speaking skills and racial organizing method, was called “the most dangerous woman in America” by her opponents. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a nationally known labor organizer called Jones “the greatest woman agitator”. “The grandmother of all agitators” was the surname that U.S. senate gave her. She was proud of that title and said she hoped to live to be the great grandmother of aggregators. Her pleasant worlds were full of passion, energy, and hope. Her speeches made miners to think and act, no matter what impossible ideas she brought up, she and the miners could do anything.
The time that Mother Jones lived in, was the time in which everyone had to fight to survive. It was not pacific era. It was the epoch of political and social confusions; she felt the meaning of war and violence. She was born 50 years after American revolution, she lived in Jackson‘s presidency. She knew the civil war, the Spanish-American war, and World War I. she saw the process of industrialization and technological improvement. Telephone, electric light, radio, and … were devices she used in her daily life. She road in automobiles, and she saw the railroads link to the oceans. She saw all of the social impacts of these changes in the life of working class. She watched unions grow from secret groups of hunted men to complacent part of the established order.... Yet, she died on the eve of the New Deal.
Biography:
Mary Harris was the daughter of Roman Catholic tenant farmer on north side of Cork city, Ireland. Her birthday was estimated on August 1, 1837 by recent materials, while she later claimed a birthday of May 1, 1830. Biographer suggested that her claim to an earlier data has been an appeal to add imagine of white-haired “Mother” Jones.
The date of May 1st was chosen symbolically, representing the national labor holiday and anniversary of the Haymarket Riot.
In her birthplace, Jones watched British soldiers marched in streets, the heads of Irishmen stuck on their bayonets. her grandfather, an Irish freedom fighter was hanged and Harrises was forced to move United States in 1840, Mary graduated there from school at seventeen and became a teacher, in 1861 she married Gorge E. Jones, a member of iron molders’ union in Memphis. Probably her knowledge about unions and the psychology of workingmen increased from her husband
Her life was pleasing until the big disaster revolted her life. The first turning point in her life was the time that she lost her husband and four children by yellow fever epidemic within one week. She was forced to return to Chicago and began to work as a dressmaker, she opened a seamstress shop, she sewed cloths for wealthy residents of Chicago, Great Fire changed her life drastically again, she lost her property in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Biographers believe that working for wealthy families made the roots of Jones’s interest in labor movement. As Mara Lou Hawse (2004) cited from Fetherling, Mother Jones said: "Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside 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."
Few years after the Great Fire, she stayed in Chicago and worked as a seamstress. She had no fixed home, but Chicago was her base when she traveled back from industrial areas in the country. As she said she lived wherever which was a fight, she lived with the workers, in tent colonies or in shantytowns, near the mills or in the shadow of the tipples. To support herself, she committed to the labor struggle for human wages and working condition. She joined the Knights of Labor which was a predecessor of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies) that she helped found in 1905. At the time of founding Industrial Workers of the Word, Jones was the only woman among 27 persons who signed the manifesto of the convention to organize all industrial workers.
During the time she was most active in the labor movement, the economic system changed fundamentally. The agrarian economy replaced with industrial economy. The aftermath of this basic change was noticeable. A new condition of work was created, hunger and poverty was the fate of huge number of immigrants and misplaced farmers whom dug the nation’s coal and forged its steel. Jones was the leader of these hopeless workers to defend from their rights.
As a 30 years old woman who had lost her husband and children and became a union organizer, she began to see labor movement as her family. She reconstructed her life; she renewed herself as “mother” Jones. As a real mother she allocated her life to support the workers in railroad, steel, copper, brewing, textile, and mining industries.
As an efficient organizer in strikes she organized the United Mine Workers (UMW) in West Virginia in 1890s.
Jones bustled against social injustice by government. In 1903 she organized children textile workers in ‘children crusade’ to march from Pennsylvania to New York on President Roosevelt’s home. They demonstrated by “we want time to play” and "We want to go to school! The result of their protest was that the issue of child labor settled in the forefront of the public agenda.
After another children's march she convicted with other union organizers of conspiring to commit murder and was arrested, her arrest resulted in huge tumults by her adherents; that is why she was quickly released from prison. From that time United States Senate began to inspection the situation in mills and mines.
During the Paint Creek-Cabin in 1912-13, there was an obstreperous strike in West Virginian response to continual violence. Mother Jones learned children and wives of miners to protest against the violence. She led a march again through West Virginia. As a result of chaotic condition many people were murdered. Mother Jones was convicted by military court to commit murder and she was denounced to 20 years in prison. Her sentence made lots of furor. However, before more violence, Hatfield, the new governor set mother Jones free. A few months later she was arrested again, when she organized the coal miners in Colorado. After her release from prison, she was invited to Standard Oil's headquarters and found the opportunity to meet John D. Rockefeller, their meeting was a commencement for some reforms that Rockefeller did in Colorado mines.
In 1914, 20 women and children were killed in a miners’ tent colony in Ludlow by the Colorado militia massacred. Jones persuaded President Wilson to reprimand the agents of this calamity. As a defender, it was not pleasant for authorities to tolerate mother Jones. They did anything to condemn her; sometimes she was in court for libel, slander, and sedition.
In 1915 and 1916 she associated with strikers of garment workers and streetcar workers in New York, and then participated in strike of steel workers in Pittsburgh in 1919. It was in 1921, when she traveled to Mexico and attended in pan-American federation of labor meeting. Her attendance was the significant point in her role in the labor movement.
In 1925, two thugs attacked Jones’ house, she fought with them and injured one of them seriously, and he later died from the wounds inflicted on him by Jones. It was a good excuse to arrest Jones, Police immediately arrested her, but she was soon released when the attackers were identified as associates of a prominent local business person.
She was hospitalized several times but she continued to protest and speak when her health permitted. One of her last known public activity was in alliance, Ohio, in 1926 when she participated in Labor Day celebration.
Eventually in her 100th (or 93th) birthday party on May 1930, at a reception in Silver Spring she read congratulatory messages and "made a fiery speech for the motion-picture camera." And it was her last public appearance.
Mother Jones died seven months after her birthday, on November 1930. She is buried in union miners’ cemetery in mount olive, Illinois alongside miners who died in the Virden Riot of 1898. She called these miners, killed in strike-related violence, "her boys".
Many movements were inspired by mother Jones after her dead. In 1989-90, in Virginia and Kentucky the wives and daughters of striking coal miners those inspired by mother Jones legendary named themselves “daughters of mother Jones” In November 2007, the original musical “mother Jones and the march of the mill children”, which was based on the mother Jones’ life.
In overall, despite many disastrous events in her life, Mother Jones’s efforts and her fierce determination was expressed on her famous declaration. Her famous expression was "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." And her ideal was “to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators."
