Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Writings and Speeches

by Mary Harris Jones, Philip S. Foner (editor)

From the end of the Civil War until her death in 1930 at the age of 100, Mother Jones was a tireless fighter for the working class. This collection chronicles decades of labor battles--from the coalfields of West Virginia to the steel mills of Chicago and the garment shops of New York.

Genres: History, Labor

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (1830–1930) is one of the great legends of American progressive politics. After losing her own family to yellow fever, Mary Jones found in the lives of the downtrodden a new family to nurture and support. She did this for seventy years as a trade union organizer, a feminist, and a campaigner against child labor in America.

"Mother Jones" was born in 1830, near Dublin, Ireland to parents who were eager to emigrate. When Mary was five years old, her father came to America, where he went to work building canals and railroads, a job similar to the one he had held in Ireland. Once he became a naturalized American citizen around 1840, he sent for his wife and daughter.

The family first settled in Toronto, Canada, where Mary's father was working on one of the first Canadian railroads. They later moved to Michigan. Mary was an excellent student and she graduated with high honors from high school. She became a teacher at a Catholic school in Monroe, Michigan, soon after graduation.

She moved to Chicago to explore the possibilities of becoming a professional dressmaker, but, at age 30, returned to teaching, this time in Memphis, Tennessee. There she met and married Robert Jones, an iron worker who was an enthusiastic member of the Iron Moulder's Union. During the first four years of their marriage they had four children. Work was plentiful in Tennessee, and for a time the family enjoyed a modest prosperity. But in 1867 a sudden yellow fever epidemic swept through Memphis, taking the lives of Mary's husband and all of her children. At 37, Mary Jones's life was devastated and she was completely on her own.

She returned to Chicago and worked as a dressmaker, but her bad luck continued when her dressmaking business was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Homeless and penniless, she turned to her deceased husband's fellow union members for help. Their compassion towards her touched her heart. She felt that the union had saved her life. From that time on, she pursued union organizing with an astonishing enthusiasm that made her an American legend.

Mary Jones began working as a union activist with the Knights of Labor. This union was founded in 1869 in an attempt to unite all workers under a single organization. Mary discovered she had a real talent for inspiring others with her speeches. The Knights of Labor often sent her to particularly tense spots during strikes. She could inspire workers to stay with the union during the hard days of labor action, when there was neither work nor money.

Joining strikers in the coal mines of Pennsylvania in 1873, she witnessed conditions bordering on slavery and children near starvation. Her own Irish heritage caused her to work passionately on behalf of the mostly Irish workers. It was her kindly, protective concern for the workers in the Pennsylvania coal mines that earned her the nickname "Mother Jones."

Mother Jones moved from strike to strike. In 1877 she was involved in the nationwide walkout for better conditions for railroad workers. In 1880 she was in Chicago on behalf of workers trying to obtain an eight-hour day. She also took part in the strike at the McCormick-Harvester works, where a bomb killed several policemen and police fired randomly into a crowd of union workers, killing 11 people and wounding dozens of others.

In her 60s Mother Jones became an organizer for the United Mine Workers Union. Since judges were reluctant to jail such an elderly woman, her age was an asset to the union movement. As she grew older, her attention focused on securing laws that prohibited child labor. She made speeches and engaged newspaper writers to accompany her to places where children were working in slave-like conditions. She also became active in the movement to obtain the right of women to vote.

Reviews

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mother Jones is a legend, and maybe that legend needs to be deflated a bit. When Philip S. Foner, who was responsible for a huge number of books, both as writer and as editor needed a third publishing house, it fell to Pathfinder. And he gave it a few really good books. When the Socialist Workers Party was making its first attempt to win miners since the 1930s, he approached them with this book. But Foner had gotten caught up in wanting to not only prove another historian wrong when he said that "she left little behind on paper." He wanted to rub his nose into the dirt. Academics are like that sometimes, but sometimes Marxists seem like that too, so maybe 'nuff said. But it wound up being a gigantic book, rather disproportionate to her importance--she made huge mistakes, and sometimes lied to the miners to justify her positions (see Thunder In the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21). So, this book, largely from newspaper accounts, has a large part of the legacy of Mother Jones

Pathfinder has a book Eugene V. Debs Speaks, which is 336 pages. This volume is 1073 pages. Foner defends the idea that Mother Jones was a revolutionary by quoting her proclaiming herself "a Bolshevist from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet." She said that a number of times, but Debs used a similar formulation before she did, and at the time was much closer to meaning it. To me she was a well-intentioned fighter, who said many different things at different times. Still worth learning about, but not quite what Foner wants to make her into.