Mary Harris Jones - the Most Dangerous Woman in America - Essay Example

The Mother of Organizers Mary Harris Jones, “the most dangerous woman in America” according to a turn of the 20th Century district attorney, was an outspoken advocate of worker’s rights in a time when little attention was given to their circumstances. Usually wearing a plain black dress and hat, Jones was small in stature but was a courageous working class warrior. Though Jones gained distinction and fame from her inspired speeches, her most important accomplishment may have been her easiest was inventing the “Mother Jones” persona. Few knew her as Mary, this allowed her the freedom to play a role bold enough to get attention and initiate change. She could shield herself behind this persona in a time when women were to be seen and seldom heard or opinionated, especially older women. In this period of history workers routinely put in 12-hour work days in unsafe conditions for low wages, both adults and children. Many factory and mine workers lived in company housing and shopped at company stores. Essentially they were indentured servants, slaves of corporations. Mother Jones envisioned a country that was not made up of only the very rich and the very poor. Her efforts helped start the building blocks of a middle class. Her technique was brash and bold, especially for the times, and she lost at least as many fights for rights as she won but the wins made a great impression on the nation and made the lives of countless families better both then and for future generations. Mary Harris and her family immigrated to Canada from their home in Ireland when she was a young girl due to the potato famine that ravaged the island country during the 1840s. At an early age Mary was witness to people suffering on a massive scale. Many families escaped starvation in Ireland by travelling across the ocean in search of a better life. She was raised in a secure working-class environment where she learned how to be a dressmaker, a customary skill for immigrant women. She also studied to become a teacher, highly uncustomary for the day. She crossed the border to America soon after turning 20 years-old seeking employment as a dressmaker. After a short time she moved to Memphis, Tenn. where she married George Jones, a unionized trade worker. Mary bore George four children. Tragedy struck their family and many other in 1867 when an epidemic of yellow fever swept through Memphis. George and all four children died. Mary moved back to Chicago where she opened a small dress shop where she worked in anonymity for the next 25 years. Mary became dressmaker to Chicago’s wealthiest women. Her service to the wealthy gave her a decent income and their presence in her shop sparked her involvement in the social cause of works rights. “I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front.” (Collins, 2003). On one side of the glass were the financially comfortable, spoiled socialites without a care and on the other the misery of the cold, poor working class, a disturbing contrast for Mary. “My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.” (Collins, 2003). Mary again suffered a tragic incident when her small but thriving dress shop burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. “Mary Jones was an aging, poor, widowed Irish immigrant nearly as dispossessed as an American could be. She had survived plague, famine, and fire only to confront a lonely old age.” (Gorn, 2001). With no reason to stay in Chicago and inspired by the stark contrast of the “haves” and the “have-nots” she witnessed daily in her shop, Mary decided to see more of America. The country was becoming increasingly industrialized bringing new types of jobs requiring a greater number of skilled workers who were facing the same old repressive work conditions. Mary began championing employee rights moving from town to town. She helped organize jobless men in Kansas City for a march on Washington, D.C., assisted miners in Birmingham, Ala. during a national coal strike. Mary went on to organize people who demonstrated an enormous show of support for American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs following his six-month prison stint for disobeying a court order to stop impeding rail traffic in support of striking railroad workers. (Collins, 2003). “For a quarter of a century, she roamed America, the Johnny Appleseed of activists. She literally had no permanent residence. ‘My address is like my shoes,’ she told a congressional committee. ‘It travels with me wherever I go.’” (Gorn, 2001). Mary Jones was an unconventional woman for her times as were her organizing techniques. She encouraged black workers, women and children to be actively involved in strikes. She organized the wives of coal miners into teams arming them with brooms and mops to guard the mine openings against scab workers (non-union workers) while their husbands were picketing. The children of the miners were given signs reading “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines” as they paraded around the mines alongside their parents. Though the United Mine Workers and Socialist Party of America paid her a small wage to assist in their causes, Jones went wherever she was needed to promote worker’s rights including the Pittsburgh steelworkers, Calumet (Michigan) copper miners, streetcar operators in El Paso, Milwaukee breweries bottle washers and, a group particularly close to her heart, the striking garment workers of Chicago. The railway union workers began calling her “Mother” after she gave a fiery speech at their convention in 1897. That became her moniker from then on. Mary travelled to Pittsburgh that same summer to assist when miners by the tens of thousands went on a nationwide strike. Her popularity among the workers of America became nationwide as well. She became known only as “Mother Jones” by millions of working class people all across the country due to her tireless, enthusiastic efforts on their behalf. “She was by far the most famous and charismatic organizer for the United Mine Workers. When she began working for that fledgling union in the 1890s, it had 10,000 members; within a few years, 300,000 men had joined.” (Gorn, 2001). Mother Jones was, to say the least, a polarizing figure. She was the working class hero to millions but was considered the enemy of many wealthy business owners, land barons and the politicians they influenced. “She was banished from more towns and was held incommunicado in more jails in more states than any other union leader of the time.” (Gorn, 2001). A West Virginia military tribunal charged her with a capital crime in 1912 and placed her under arrest for several weeks until national attention caused by public outrage forced the state’s governor to release her. Jones was the best known and most effective organizer of her day. The United Mine Workers Union asked her to sign up members in the coalfields and mines, a dangerous proposition at that time. Mine owners often used their political connections and employed thugs to keep workers from unionizing. She went fearlessly into the toughest mining camps in the country such as those in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and, maybe worst of all, Colorado. “Mother Jones was deeply affected by the ‘machine-gun massacre’ in Ludlow, Colo., when National Guardsmen raided a tent colony of striking miners and their families, killing 20 people - mostly women and children.” (Collins, 2003). Jones trekked back and forth throughout the country promoting worker rights and telling of their plight. The U.S. Congress was so impressed with her efforts and knowledge she was asked to testify before that body. Almost anywhere steel, textile or coal workers were trying to organize Mother Jones was right alongside them. As committed as Mother Jones was to adult workers, she was also was very interested in child labor practices. To help call attention to her cause of ending child labor, she helped organize a strike involving 100,000 silk workers in Philadelphia. 16,000 of these workers were small children. Their demand was a reduction in the hours, from a 60 hour workweek to 55. (Collins, 2003). In 1903, already famous nationwide from the highly publicized violent “mine wars” in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Jones organized the legendary “march of the mill children” that began in Philadelphia and ended at Long Island, New York at President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer house. “Every day, she and a few dozen children, boys and girls, some 12 and 14 years old, some crippled by the machinery of the textile mills walked to a new town and at night they staged rallies with music, skits, and speeches, drawing thousands of citizens.” (Gorn, 2001). Federal child labor laws would not be realized in the U.S. for several years afterward but Jones made national headlines for two exciting months that summer which included electrifying speeches and dramatic children’s street theater. Mother Jones’ vision for social justice was genuine but the scope of her tireless efforts was limited. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, Jones was opposed to the women’s suffrage movement which was demanding women be allowed to vote. She considered suffrage to be a bogus issue, that is was created by the upper class to divert attention away from the genuine issue of worker mistreatment. According to Jones, only strong unions could hope to bring real and lasting justice to the working class. Her single-mindedness of issue proved an invaluable instrument for achieving workers rights all across the country but it also blinded her to the continuing problems facing persons of color and women. The foundation of Mother Jones’ conviction was her belief that working class persons must work together to liberate themselves from powerlessness and poverty. Her message is still needed today as the “one-percent” continues in their efforts to suppress the working class by influencing politicians and breaking unions. Mother Jones stopped traveling continuously in her 80’s settling near Washington, D.C. but would still go wherever needed to support workers. Her last appearance was, fittingly, Chicago in 1924 to assist striking dressmakers. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones died at her home in Silver Spring, Md. near the age of 100 and was buried in Illinois. References Collins, Gail. (2003). America’s Women, p. 287-289; The Illinois Labor History Society. Retrieved June 30, 2012 from http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Key-People-in-Labor-History/Mother-Jones-1837-1930 Gorn, Elliot J. (May/June 2001 Issue). Mother Jones: The Woman Mother Jones Magazine Retrieved June 30, 2012 from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/mother-jones-woman Read More