Working Together Part VII: Mother Jones (a Sunday Griot special)

She was thirty feet tall, bulletproof and breathed fire.

OK, not really. But to laborers and capitalists alike of her day, she was scarier than any movie monster could have been, because she had super-powers unheard of today: She wasn’t afraid of any thing, she wasn’t afraid of any one, she believed without question that her cause was just and she told the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

She was born Mary Harris, but the world knew her as Mother Jones. She truly comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. And how!

Mary Harris was born in 1836 in County Cork, Ireland. She claimed in later life to have been born in 1830, but in my admittedly speculative opinion this was probably to make her more formidable as an opponent. Who wouldn’t come to the defense of an old woman? She came by her temperament honestly; her grandfather was hanged because he fought for Irish independence, and her father had to flee to Canada to avoid a similar fate. Soon after her grandfather’s death the family joined the father near Toronto, where Mary went to school and learned a seamstress’ trade.

In 1861 Mary married George Jones, an iron moulder, and they settled in Tennessee. Their happiness was not to last; in 1867 a yellow fever epidemic struck and killed George and their children. She packed up and moved to Chicago, where she took up her trade as a seamstress. From her vantage point above the city, she could see the injustices in American society:

We were located on Washington Street near the lake. We worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. 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 wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.

Summers, too, from the windows of the rich, I used to watch the mothers come from the west side slums, lugging babies and little children, hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air from the lake. At night, when the tenements were stifling hot, men, women and little children slept in the parks. But the rich, having donated to the ice fund, had, by the time it was hot in the city, gone to seaside and mountains.

(All quotes in this diary are from The Autobiography of Mother Jones. The link points to an online, public domain version of her autobiography. It is fairly short and deserves to be read by any student of labor, class warfare or hellraising.)

The great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed Mary’s dressmaking business. This placed one of the most important weapons in her arsenal: her husband and children were gone and all her worldly possessions were destroyed. She literally had nothing left to lose but her life, and that prospect didn’t seem to worry her.

During her time in Chicago Mary had spent her off time meeting with the Knights of Labor, an organization that sought to organize the working class as a whole rather than by trade specialty. After the fire she spent more and more time with the Knights of Labor, eventually formally joining the organization and resolving to dedicate her life to better the conditions of working people everywhere.

For fifty years she traveled around the country with no fixed address, seemingly appearing wherever there was a strike. In 1910 she described herself to Congress:

“I live in the United States,” said I, “but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. Sometimes I am in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado. My address is like my shoes: it travels with me.”

Her fiery speaking style, a mixture of her natural abilities and the education she gained in the company of the Knights of Labor, endeared her to the working people she served. Their bosses . . . well, they didn’t want her anywhere near “their” workers. Friends and foes alike began to call her “Mother Jones.”

—

Let me take a brief picture of what life was like back in those days. If you were a miner, miller, railroad worker or other laborer, you most likely worked 10 hours a day, at least. Twelve-hour days were not uncommon. You would work at least six days a week. Usually if you worked on Sunday you would get time off to go to church — a church owned by the company. And in return, you were paid not in dollars, but in scrip issued by the company you worked for. Scrip that, of course, had no value outside the company. So, your wife had to buy food and clothes at the company store. You paid rent to the company for the house you lived in. Your expenses were always higher than your earnings, because the company charged exorbitant prices, so you were always in debt, and even if you weren’t, it was hard to go anywhere or make anything of yourself, because you had no money to do it with and were in debt to the company besides.

When the old song Sixteen Tons says

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store

it isn’t kidding or exaggerating.

In fact if you couldn’t work or the debt got too high, your family might have to pitch in. Women would work in mills or doing other labor. Often their children would join them, some as young as four although it was uncommon to see a child younger than six working. These children would move in and around heavy, dangerous machinery. It was hard work, and took its toll. Few went to school, and those who did paid a price:

“How old are you, lad!” I asked him.

“Twelve,” he growled as he spat tobacco on the ground.

“Say son,” I said, “I’m Mother Jones. You know me, don’t you! I know you told the mine foreman you were twelve, but what did you tell the union!”

He looked at me with keen, sage eyes. Life had taught him suspicion and caution.

“Oh, the union’s different. I’m ten come Christmas.”

“Why don’t you go to school!”

“Gee,” he said-though it was really something stronger – “I ain’t lost no leg!” He looked proudly at his little legs.

I knew what he meant: that lads went to school when they were incapacitated by accidents.

Need I mention that the schools were owned by the company as well?

And of course, the corollary to this was that if you incurred the displeasure of the mine owners — by trying to organize the other workers into a union, for instance, or by participating in a strike — you not only lost your job, you lost your home, and since you were forbidden to set foot on company land again (which often extended for many miles around the mine itself), you lost all your friends.

At the other end of the spectrum were the mine owners and foremen. The foremen had better working conditions than the miners, so long as the miners produced. At the top of the chain were those who owned the companies — the ones Mother Jones had looked down on in Chicago as she sewed. They reaped the benefit of the bitter crop they had sown, living in fancy mansions and eating and drinking well. They could afford anything they could buy — houses, yachts, congressmen, entire states. John Rockefeller — yes, that John Rockefeller — owned the Colorado Iron and Fuel Company, and had an iron grip on the state government, a fact not lost on Mother Jones:

One day I read in the newspaper that Governor Ammons of Colorado said that Mother; Jones was not to be allowed to go into the southern field where the strike was raging.

That night I took a train and went directly to Denver. I got a room in the hotel where I usually stayed. I then went up to Union head-quarters of the miners, after which I went to the station and bought my ticket and sleeper to Trinidad in the southern field.

When I returned to the hotel, a man who had registered when I did, came up to me and said, “Are you going to Trinidad, Mother Jones!”

“Of course,” said I,

“Mother, I want to tell you that the governor has detectives at the hotel and railway station watching you.”

“Detectives don’t bother me,” I told him.

“There are two detectives in the lobby, one up in the gallery, and two or three at the station watching the gates to see who boards the trains south.”

I thanked him for his information. That night I went an hour or so before the coaches were brought into the station way down into the railway yards where the coaches stood ready to be coupled to the train. I went to the section house. There was an old section hand there.

He held up his lantern to see me. “Oh, Mother Jones,” he said, “and is it you that’s walking the ties?”

“It’s myself,” said I, “but I’m not walking. I have a sleeper ticket for the south and I want to know if the trains are made up yet. I want to go aboard.”

“Sit here,” he said, “I’ll go see. I don’t know.” I knew he understood without any explaining why I was there.

“I wish you would tell the porter to come back with you,” said I.

He went out his light bobbing at his side. Pretty Soon he returned with the porter.

“What you want, Mother?” says he.

“I want to know if the berths are made up yet?” “Do you want to get on now, Mother?” “Yes.”

“Then yours is made up.” I showed him my tickets and he led me across the tracks.

“Mother,” he said, “I know you now but later I might find it convenienter not to have the acquaintance.”

“I understand,” said I. “Now here’s two dollars to give to the conductor. Tell him to let Mother Jones off before we get to the Santa Fe crossing. That will be early in the morning.”

“I sure will,” said he.

I got on board the sleeper in the yards and was asleep when the coaches pulled into the Denver station for passengers south. I was still asleep when the train pulled out of the depot.

Early in the morning the porter awakened me. “Mother,” he said, the conductor is going to stop the train for you. Be ready to hop.”

When the train slowed down before we got to the crossing, the conductor came to help me off.

“Are you doing business, Mother!” said he. “I am indeed,” said I. “And did you stop the train just for me!”

“I certainly did!”

He waved to me as the train pulled away. “Goodbye, Mother.” It was very early and I walked into the little town of Trinidad and got breakfast. Down at the station a company of military were watching to see if I came into town. But no Mother Jones got off at the depot, and the company marched back to headquarters, which was just across the street from the hotel where I was staying.

I was in Trinidad three hours before they knew I was there. They telephoned the governor. They telephoned General Chase in charge of the militia. “Mother Jones is in Trinidad!” they said.

“Impossible!” said the governor. “Impossible!” said the general.

“Nevertheless, she is here!”

“We have had her well watched, the hotels and the depots,” they said.

“Nevertheless, she is here!”

Mother Jones loved the working people she fought for, and they loved her right back. It certainly seemed that she could go anywhere she wanted and find a place to stay and plenty to eat when she got there. Her lifestyle did have its disadvantages, though — there were long stretches where she didn’t even dare to undress because she was afraid she would have to leave on a moment’s notice.

If she had many friends among the working classes, she had many enemies among the rich and powerful. Not all of them were mine owners or state governors. She had no use for those she considered traitors to their class, such as John Mitchell, the president of the United Mine Workers. Mitchell earned her enmity when she denounced the intention of a group of miners to subscribe to a $10,000 house for Mitchell when their dwellings were barely worthy to be described as hovels. She derided him in her autobiography for practices like traveling around Europe, studying their labor unions at UMW expense while staying in fine hotels and traveling first class, while miners in America were either working like slaves or striking for an eight-hour work day and a fair wage.

Those who kept their word and helped her in her fight for the working man earned praise from her. For instance, she had high praise for George W. P. Hunt, several times governor of Arizona:

I came to know Governor Hunt, a most human and just man. One day I saw the governor stop his machine and ask a poor man with his bundle of blankets over his back, where he was going. The man was a “blanket-stiff,” a wandering worker. His clothes were dusty. His shoes in slithers. He told the governor where he was going.

“Jump in,” said the governor, opening the door of his machine.

The man shook his head, looking at his dusty clothes and shoes.

The governor understood. “Oh, jump in,” he laughed. “I don’t mind outside dirt. It’s the dirt in people’s hearts that counts!”

Governor Hunt never forgot that although he was governor, he was just like other folks.

—

Perhaps no incident from the life of Mother Jones is more characteristic of her and her struggles than an incident known as the March of the Mill Children. Mother loved children, and they loved her. It broke her heart that children not only had to work so hard at the young ages required of them in her lifetime, but that in some ways owners preferred them, because children were docile and easy to “manage.”

In 1903 the mill workers of Kensington, Pennsylvania were on strike. There were 75,000 striking workers, and over 10,000 of them were children. She would look over the poor wretches, dirty, stooped, broken in spirit and all too often in body. Many of them were missing fingers, thumbs, or entire limbs from run-ins with dangerous machinery. At the time Pennsylvania had a law forbidding children under 12 from working, but the influence of the mill owners was strong enough that the law was essentially meaningless. Mothers would perjure themselves swearing to the childrens’ ages; the alternative was starvation.

I asked the newspaper men why they didn’t publish the facts about child labor in Pennsylvania. They said they couldn’t because the mill owners had stock in the papers.

“Well, I’ve got stock in these little children,” said I,” and I’ll arrange a little publicity.”

Mother gathered a group of children together, showing the public their hunched frames and missing limbs and declaring that the mansions of Philadelphia were built upon the broken bodies of these children, and those in charge of the companies and the government seemed to neither know nor care. The newspapers printed the quote, the universities began to discuss the question, and the working children of Kensington became the topic of discussion for a while, but Mother Jones wanted more.

She asked the parents of some of the children if they would allow her to take them on an excursion from Philadelphia to New York. She promised to return them safe and sound. They consented, and a few agreed to go along to help with the children. Mother had two destinations in mind: Wall Street, where she hoped to meet with J. P. Morgan, the owner of the mines where many of the children’s fathers worked; and Oyster Bay, the summer home of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had several children of his own, and she hoped he would equate his own children with the ones she marched with.

They started with a mass meeting in Philadelphia, and then marched for New York. The weather was hot, and the children tired easily, but at least they didn’t have to work from sun-up to sun-down. In addition they took advantage of every brook and stream along the way to wade and play in. Farmers heard about their journey and came out to meet them with wagonloads of food. Their wives provided clothing and money. Streetcar conductors would give the children free rides on the interurban railroads.

It was a chance to be a child for once instead of an under-aged wage slave.

All along the way Mother Jones arranged meetings, alerting the citizens along the way to the horrors of child labor. Finally they reached the outskirts of New York, only to be denied entry into the city by the commissioner of police.

Mother Jones went across the river on her own to see the mayor, a man named Seth Low. Mayor Low professed sympathy to her cause, but said he had to stand by his police commissioner. She asked on what grounds they were to be denied entrance into the city; the mayor said it was because they were not citizens of New York.

“Oh, I think we will clear that up, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “Permit me to call your attention to an incident which took place in this nation just a year ago. A piece of rotten royalty came over here from Germany, called Price Henry. The Congress of the United States voted $45,000 to fill that fellow’s stomach three weeks and to entertain him. His highness was getting $4,000,000 dividends out of the blood of the workers in this country. Was he a citizen of this land?”

“And it was reported, Mr. Mayor, that you and all the officials of New York and the University Club entertained that chap.” And repeated, “Was he a citizen of New York!”

“No, Mother,” said the mayor, “he was not.”

“And a Chinaman called Lee Woo was also entertained by the officials of New York. Was he a citizen of New York?”

“No, Mother, he was not.”

“Did they ever create any wealth for our nation!”

“No, Mother, they did not,” said he.

“Well, Mr. Mayor, these are the little citizens of the nation and they also produce its wealth. Aren’t we entitled to enter your city!”

They were allowed to enter the city. Mother asked to speak in Madison Square, but was refused. Again, she pointed out that the single-taxers spoke there. “Yes,” said a police captain, “but they might get twenty people to show up, and you might get twenty thousand!” In the end they secured a location on Twentieth Street, and Mother gave her speech to a robust crowd.

The next day, Mother and the children went to Coney Island as the guests of the owner of the wild animal exhibit. Mother, ever the showman, arranged for some of the children to be placed in cages near a backdrop showing a Roman gladiator scene:

I told the crowd that the scene was typical of the aristocracy of employers with their thumb down to the little ones of the mills and factories, and people sitting dumbly by.

“We want President Roosevelt to hear the wail of the children who never have a chance to go to school but work eleven and twelve hours a day in the textile mills of Pennsylvania; who weave the carpets that he and you walk upon and the lace curtains in your windows, and the clothes of the people. Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers. Fifty years ago the black babies were sold C. 0.D. Today the white baby is sold on the installment plan.

“In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about little children from whom all song is gone?

“I shall ask the president in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones that he emancipate them from slavery. I will tell the president that the prosperity he boasts of is the prosperity of the rich wrung from the poor and the helpless.

“The trouble is that no one in Washington cares. I saw our legislators in one hour pass three bills for the relief of the railways but when labor cries for aid for the children they will not listen.

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

“We are told that every American boy has the chance of being president. I tell you that these little boys in the iron cages would sell their chance any day for good square meals and a chance to play. These little toilers whom I have taken from the mills –deformed, dwarfed in body and soul, with nothing but toil before them -have never heard that they have a chance, the chance of every American male citizen, to become the president.

“You see those monkeys in those cages over there.” I pointed to a side cage. “The professors are trying to teach them to talk. The monkeys are too wise for they fear that the manufacturers would buy them for slaves in their factories.”

I wish I could tell you the march was an unqualified success, but in some ways it was a failure. There is no record that Mother Jones got her meeting with J. P. Morgan, and President Roosevelt refused to meet with her or even answer her letters. However, public attention was turned to the plight of the working children, and Pennsylvania soon passed a law raising the minimum work age to 14.

In some ways the story of the Children’s March is typical of Mother Jones’ career as a union organizer and a hellraiser (for so she styled herself). When she wasn’t in prison or otherwise being held incommunicado, she fought for the rights of the working class, not only in this country but wherever there was injustice. The quote at the beginning of this story is from Congressional testimony she gave with regard to the Mexican revolution against the corrupt rule of Diaz. For every step forward she made, it seems she ended up going back a step and a half. Workers sometimes gained their objectives when they organized, but just as often or more so they wound up having their strikes broken by scabs, armed goons (sometimes with the aid of the military), foreigners who didn’t understand what was at stake, or fear. Sometimes she saw gains she had worked hard for — and encouraged others to work, fight and sometimes die for — co-opted by the bribing of lawmen, lawmakers, government officials and even union officials. She fought all her life against a public apathy toward where their standard of living came from, having to constantly shock them out of complacency to get them to help her in her cause. She fought on even though she saw these defeats throughout her lifetime.

Why?

Well, it goes back to what I said at the top of this diary. She wasn’t afraid of any thing, she wasn’t afraid of any one, and she was willing to stand up and tell the truth as she saw it, regardless of who she offended or what feathers she ruffled. She was a hellraiser. She wasn’t interested in women’s suffrage — she felt the question of labor was too important to be sidetracked by other issues. She is the author of the quote I’ve been using as a sig here ever since I started researching the story:

“You must stand for free speech in the streets,” I told them.

“How can we,” piped a woman, “when we haven’t a vote?”

“I have never had a vote,” said I, “and I have raised hell all over this country! You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!”

In these times of mass disenfranchisement, that quote takes on a whole new meaning.

And that’s what I want to leave you with at the end of my diary. Mother Jones didn’t just sit around dithering about what was to be done. She got out and raised hell, and by God wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had more people doing that today. There are a few of them. Cindy Sheehan comes to mind. So does Michael Moore, and their targets hate them for it. But there aren’t enough people out raising hell. Some are scared; some still feel they have something to lose; some just haven’t overcome inertia enough to do anything yet.

Just think what Mother Jones could have done if she’d have had a blog.

I’m just sayin’ . . .