Mother Jones

She was baptized in Cork in August 1837, the daughter of Catholic tenant farmers, and the Famine put the family on a boat to Canada before she was 11. Toronto Normal School took her because it charged nothing and paid a dollar a week for every semester finished. She never graduated. It was training enough for a teaching post at a convent in Monroe, Michigan, which she took on the last day of August 1859 at eight dollars a month, in a building her biographer calls a depressing place. She gave up the classroom, sewed for a living in Chicago, then moved to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George Jones, an organizer for the iron moulders. For six years she kept his house.

Fever emptied that house in 1867 and fire took the shop she rebuilt in 1871. She made herself a full-time organizer, first for the Knights of Labor and then for the United Mine Workers, on the road 40 years: Pennsylvania silk mills, West Virginia coal camps, the Colorado fields around Ludlow, a Socialist Party card from 1901. In 1913 a West Virginia military tribunal convicted her of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced her to 20 years. She served 85 days. BriefHistory carries the campaigns and the figure who ran them. What follows is what the figure was made of.

The grandmother was a costume. By 60 she was claiming to be older than she was and dressing 20 years behind the fashion, and the first newspaper to print the name Mother Jones did so in 1897. She had no use for woman suffrage — you do not need the vote to raise hell, she said — and the women she organized carried brooms and beat on tin pans in support of the men, not as workers. In the 1901 Pennsylvania silk strike she pushed for a settlement that sent the girls back into the mills. In August 1921 she stood in front of miners marching on Logan County and read out a telegram from President Harding and refused to show it. Harding's secretary denied sending one, the union's Frank Keeney called her a fake, and she left the camp.

She died on the Burgess farm in Maryland in November 1930 and was buried in Illinois, at the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, beside the men shot at Virden in 1898 whom she called her boys. Six years later the breakaway Progressive Mine Workers had saved more than 16,000 dollars for 80 tons of Minnesota pink granite and two bronze miners, and roughly 50,000 people came for the unveiling on October 11, 1936. Mount Olive still keeps the day. A San Francisco magazine took her name in the 1970s and made it famous again. Biographers now read her 1925 autobiography as another performance rather than a record, which is roughly how she handled her own age.

Mother Jones's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Pennsylvania silk strike organizing other
  She brought in the strikers' wives and then settled for terms that returned the girls to the mills 1901
• March of the Mill Children other
  125 miles from Kensington in Philadelphia to Theodore Roosevelt's door at Oyster Bay 1903
• Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike organizing other
  The campaign that ended in her court-martial and a 20-year sentence 1912
• Colorado coalfield organizing other
  The strike against Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron that produced the Ludlow Massacre 1914
• The Autobiography of Mother Jones book
  Written from 1923 and published by Charles H. Kerr — read now as performance 1925

• 1847 aged ~10 The Famine drives the Harris family from Cork to Canada She was about 10.
• August 31, 1859 aged ~22 Takes a convent teaching post in Monroe, Michigan, at eight dollars a month She had trained at Toronto Normal School but never graduated.
• 1861 aged ~24 Marries George E. Jones, an organizer for the iron moulders, in Memphis
• 1897 aged ~60 A newspaper prints the name Mother Jones for the first time By 60 she was claiming extra years and dressing two decades out of date.
• 1902 aged ~65 A West Virginia prosecutor calls her the most dangerous woman in America Reese Blizzard, in an injunction case.
• 1903 aged ~66 Marches mill children 125 miles to Oyster Bay Roosevelt would not receive them.
• February 13, 1913 aged ~76 Arrested in West Virginia and court-martialed for conspiracy to commit murder She refused to recognize the military court. Sentenced to 20 years, released after 85 days.
• August 1921 aged ~84 Reads out a telegram from President Harding and will not show it to anyone The president's secretary denied sending one. Frank Keeney of the UMW called her a fake.
• May 1, 1930 aged ~93 Celebrates a hundredth birthday on film at the Burgess farm She was about 93. She died there seven months later.

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. marched children to his door
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. struck against his Colorado company
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. fellow Socialist agitator
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. wrote the child labor ban she demanded
• Elizabeth Gurley Flynn 1890–1964
  Organized IWW strikes and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. successor on the picket line
• John L. Lewis 1880–1969
  Union leader who built the United Mine Workers and helped found the CIO, expanding industrial unionism and collective bargaining. inherited her union