Mother Jones

Labor Organizer

  • Born: May 1, 1830
  • Birthplace: Cork, Ireland
  • Died: November 30, 1930
  • Place of death: Silver Spring, Maryland

Irish-born American labor organizer

As a labor organizer and fiery and captivating orator, Jones inspired workers and breathed life into union organizing efforts in the early twentieth century.

Areas of achievement Labor movement, oratory, social reform, women’s rights

Early Life

The birth date of Mother Jones is in dispute, as are other critical facts about her early life. This uncertainty is not unusual for poor and working-class people whose lives are often not recorded in traditional ways. Even births, deaths, marriages, and work history may not be documented. In her autobiography, Jones herself gave 1830 as her birth year, but she gave other dates in interviews throughout her life. Most historians agree on 1830, although one cites 1839 and another 1843. Jones’s father migrated to the United States from Ireland and worked as a laborer building canals and railroads. The family followed and settled initially in Toronto, Canada, where young Jones went to school, graduating in 1858 or 1859. Little is known of her father and mother or her siblings.

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Jones taught school in Michigan in 1859, worked as a dressmaker in Chicago in 1860, and again taught school in Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis, she met George Jones, a member of the Iron Workers’ Union, and in 1861 they were married. George Jones and all the couple’s children died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867. In her autobiography, Mother Jones claims to have had four children, but some evidence exists to suggest it may have been one or three. No one disputes the fact that Jones was alone after 1867 with no family and no permanent home.

Jones left Memphis in 1867 to return to Chicago, where she resumed working as a dressmaker for the wealthy. In 1871, she was burned out of her home and lost all of her possessions in the great Chicago Fire. Following the fire, she began attending nightly lectures at the Knights of Labor building, which was located near the place where many homeless refugees from the fire were camping out. Records of these years of her life are scarce, but it is known that Mother Jones traveled during the 1870’s and 1880’s from one industrial area to another speaking and organizing, usually in connection with the Knights of Labor. In 1877, she was in Pittsburgh for the first nationwide industrial strike, that of the railroad workers. In 1886, she was in Chicago, active in organizing for the eight-hour work day. In 1890, when the Knights of Labor District 135 and the National Union of Miners and Mine Laborers merged to form the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Jones became a paid organizer for the union. She was approximately sixty years old and about to enter the national stage. She was thought of as “the Miners’ Angel,” the most dangerous woman in the country, or America’s most patriotic citizen, depending on the point of view of the different people who encountered her.

Life’s Work

Until her health failed in the late 1920’s, Jones traveled the nation speaking and organizing not only for coal miners but also for workers in the textile, railway, and steel industries. She figured in most major strikes in the United States in the early 1900’s but was repeatedly drawn to the coalfields of Pennsylvania, Colorado, and West Virginia. For a time, she was active in Socialist Party politics, particularly in the campaigns of Eugene V. Debs. She supported Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in his fight for better wages and living conditions for Mexican workers, who were often used as strikebreakers, particularly in Western mines. She did not support woman suffrage or other social reform efforts of her era that were not founded solely on working-class rights.

Her speeches reveal that Jones saw herself as an agitator and educator charged with the tasks of teaching the American working class about the nature of capitalism and mobilizing an international working-class movement. In 1909, she told the national convention of the UMWA that she was there to “wake you up.” At a UMWA district convention in 1914 she explained, “I hold no office only that of disturbing.” In 1920, near the end of her public speaking career, she summarized her mission: “I am busy getting this working man to understand what belongs to him, and his power to take possession of it.”

Jones was so effective at “disturbing” workers that corporate and government officials often went to great extremes to keep her from speaking. She was arrested many times, imprisoned, and forcefully escorted out of strike zones where she had been called to help organize. Her success as an educator is less easily documented, but her speeches and audience responses reveal a talented, tireless woman who was able to move people to action while instructing them about the nature of their conflicts and their place in history.

Conditions in mines and mining communities in the early 1900’s were stark. Wages were low, mines were unsafe, rates of deaths and disabling injuries were very high, and children were often employed. Miners lived in company-owned housing and were often paid in scrip, a substitute currency that could be redeemed only at company stores. If miners tried to improve their conditions through union organizing, they and their families were evicted from houses, and armed guards (often from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency) were hired by the companies to fight the organizing efforts.

In the face of these conditions Jones devised a wide array of organizing strategies, as the 1897 UMWA strike at Turtle Creek near Pittsburgh illustrates. She spoke to ten thousand miners and sympathizers, urging them to fight. Then she organized farmers in the region to provide food to strikers and escorted the farmers and their wagons to strike headquarters where the food was distributed. She called on neighborhood women to donate a “pound” of something to the cause and urged factory workers to come to miners’ meetings and donate. As in many other strikes, Jones made certain that women and children were actively involved and featured in national news coverage of the conflicts. At Turtle Creek, she organized wives of miners into groups of pickets and demonstrators and positioned the children of miners at the front of parades. In one parade fifty little girls marched with homemade banners, one of which read “Our Papas Aren’t Scared.”

Jones was often in West Virginia in these early years of the twentieth century. In 1902, she worked in the southern coalfields, but she was successful in organizing only in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas near Charleston, the state capital. While trying to organize the northern part of the state, she was arrested and briefly imprisoned. For several years she traveled across the country to protest child labor, organize miners in the West, and support striking brewery workers, textile workers, copper miners, and smelter workers. Then in 1912 and 1913, once again working as a UMWA organizer, Mother Jones returned to West Virginia’s southern coalfields. She faced down armed mine guards to allow union meetings and threatened to encourage West Virginia miners to arm themselves and fight back. She was imprisoned again, tried by a state military militia court, convicted of a charge of conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to prison for twenty years. She served eighty-five days, passing her eighty-fourth birthday in jail, before national public outcry and the promise of a congressional investigation prompted that state’s newly elected governor to free her.

In her final organizing effort with West Virginia miners, Jones attempted to halt the spontaneous 1921 march of thousands of miners on Logan. It was an unusual role for the aging firebrand, and she was not able to stop the march, later known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. That bloody confrontation left many dead and injured. The determined coal miners proved powerless in the face of armed Baldwin-Felts detectives, the state militia, and the six thousand federal troops and twenty military airplanes sent by President Warren G. Harding to support the coal operators and prevent the union men from marching into nonunion territory. The battle halted organizing efforts in West Virginia until national legislation authorized collective bargaining in 1932.

Organizing miners in Colorado was as difficult as in West Virginia. Jones made her first visits there in 1903 soon after John D. Rockefeller, Sr., bought control of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and the Victor Fuel Company. These early organizing efforts were not successful and led to a split between Jones and the UMWA leadership over organizing strategy. She did not return to the UMWA payroll until 1911.

In 1913, miners in southern Colorado went on strike for higher wages; an eight-hour day; coal weighing to be monitored by miners; free choice of stores, schools, doctors, and boardinghouses; enforcement of Colorado laws; and abolition of the mine guard system. Although most of these provisions were already law in Colorado, the state did not implement them in the southern fields. When the miners went on strike, they were evicted and lived in tent cities through the bitter cold Colorado winter.

Jones joined the striking miners there in the fall of 1913 and returned in December and again in January. Between January and March of 1914, Jones, then in her early eighties, was arrested many times and spent more than a month in basement jail cells in Colorado. Refusing to be silenced, she smuggled out an open letter to the American people that was read and published across the country. She was not in Colorado in April when the state militia attacked the family tent camp, killing thirty-two, including many women and children. Subsequent state and national investigations into this incident, known as the Ludlow Massacre, were extremely critical of the actions of the governor, the state militia, and Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

When Jones wrote about her life she always identified her cause with the miners. After her death on November 30, 1930, she was buried as she had requested at the Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. A choir of coal miners sang her final tribute.

Significance

Jones is remembered as a great labor agitator and a tremendously effective public speaker. Stories of her visits to coal camps, leadership at rallies and demonstrations, and confrontations with company and government officials are part of a living oral history of resistance in mining communities. Her memory continues to inspire the labor movement. When women mobilized in a 1989 UMWA strike against the Pittston Coal Group, they identified themselves as the “Daughters of Mother Jones” as they carried out actions in her name, such as occupying company headquarters and holding vigils outside jails where union officials were imprisoned.

The message of Jones’s life is that ordinary people, indeed unlikely people, can make important contributions to improving workers’ lives. She was homeless and alone; she was poor and sometimes in prison; yet Jones used the resources she had mind, voice, wit, spirit, and energy to influence conditions for workers in America.

Bibliography

Fetherling, Dale. Mother Jones, the Miners’ Angel: A Portrait. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. This first full-scale biography on Jones presents a sympathetic yet balanced portrait.

Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Chronicles Jones’s life and work, placing her accomplishments within a wider political and cultural context.

Jones, Mother. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Edited by Mary Field Parton. Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1974. First published in 1925; later editions (1972, 1974) add useful introductions. Insights into coal strikes, early twentieth century labor leadership, and Jones’s spirit and personality. Unfortunately marred by inaccuracies and serious omissions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Correspondence of Mother Jones. Edited by Edward M. Steel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. A collection of all known letters, notes, and telegrams (eight communications are added in Steel’s 1988 collection of Jones’s speeches and writings). Illustrates development of her political views over the course of her life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Writings and Speeches. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: Monad Press, 1983. The most comprehensive work and best reference source in conveying the full range of Jones’s intellect and activities. Includes speeches, testimony before congressional committees, articles, interviews, letters, an extensive bibliography, and historical background information.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones. Edited by Edward M. Steel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Collection of thirty-one speeches believed to have been accurately recorded and transcribed in their entirety. Also includes seventeen articles Jones penned for newspapers and socialist periodicals. A helpful “Biographical Notes” section identifies people in her speeches. A good introduction to her life with historical context for her speeches and activities.

Long, Priscilla. Mother Jones: Woman Organizer And Her Relations with Miners’ Wives, Working Women, and the Suffrage Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1976. Examines Jones’s position as a female leader in the labor movement and her relationships with working-class women and with women’s rights organizations of her era.

Schiff, Karenna Gore. Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America. New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion, 2005. Mother Jones is one of the nine women profiled in this book about women who were social reformers.

1901-1940: June 27, 1905: Founding of Industrial Workers of the World; September 22, 1919-January 8, 1920: Steelworkers Strike for Improved Working Conditions.