Immigrant of the Day: Mother Jones (Ireland)

May 19, 2008

Mary Harris Jones (1830–1930), better known as Mother Jones, born in Cork, Ireland, was a prominent labor and community organizer. She was born Mary Harris, the daughter of a Roman Catholic tenant farmer, on the northside of Cork city, Ireland.

Forced to support herself, she became involved in the labor movement and joined the Knights of Labor, a predecessor to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”), which she helped found in 1905. Active as an organizer and educator in strikes throughout the country at the time, she was particularly involved with the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the Socialist Party of America. As a union organizer, she gained prominence for organizing the wives and children of striking workers. She became known as “the most dangerous woman in America”, a phrase coined by a West Virginia District Attorney named Reese Blizzard in 1902, when she was arrested for violating a labor injunction.

In 1903, Jones organized children working in mills and mines in the “Children’s Crusade”, a march from Kensington, Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York, the home of President Theodore Roosevelt with banners demanding “We want time to play!” and “We want to go to school!” The incident brought the issue of child labor to public attention. In 1913, during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia, Mother Jones was charged and kept under house arrest in the nearby town of Pratt and subsequently convicted with other union organizers of conspiring to commit murder. Her arrest raised an uproar and she was soon released, after which the U.S. Senate ordered an investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. A few months later she was in Colorado, helping to organize the coal miners there. Once again she was arrested, served jail time, and was escorted from the State in the months leading up to the Ludlow Massacre. After the massacre she was invited to Standard Oil’s headquarters at 26 Broadway to meet face-to-face with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a meeting that prompted Rockefeller to visit the Colorado mines and introduce long-sought reforms.

Mother Jones remained a union organizer for the UMW affairs into the 1920s, and continued to speak on union affairs almost until her death. She released her own account of her experiences in the labor movement as The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).

During her lifetime, Mother Jones was known to working folk as “The Miners’ Angel.” Her fierce determination was vividly expressed in her famous declaration, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” When she was denounced on the Senate floor as the “grandmother of all agitators”, she replied: “I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.”

At present, many people know of Mother Jones because her name has been emblazoned for more than three decades on the cover of every issue of Mother Jones magazine.

In her later years, Jones lived with friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess of Silver Spring, Maryland. She celebrated her 100th birthday on May 1, 1930.

Mother Jones is buried in the 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.”