Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

They called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Mary Harris Jones was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, and emigrated with her family during the Great Famine that ravaged the countryside. Safely in North America, she and her relations led itinerant lives, first in Canada, then in Michigan, then Memphis. Harris supported herself as a seamstress, having learned the craft at a convent school. She married a man named George Jones, a skilled metalworker who was also an organizer for the International Union of Iron Molders (its motto: “Equal and exact justice to all Men, of whatever state or persuasion”). Then tragedy struck. The family lived on low-lying land in the fork of a bayou, ideal conditions for the spread of yellow fever. In 1867, the disease claimed the lives of Harris’s husband and all four of their children. She herself was spared, though, and moved on to Chicago, where she opened a dressmaking shop, only for yet another unthinkable calamity to befall her four years later. The city was consumed in flames—the Great Fire of Chicago—and her business with it. Jones was luckier than some, though; her skills permitted her to find work with some of Chicago’s wealthiest families. “I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives,” she recalled in her autobiography. “Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificence on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wre...