JONES, MARY HARRIS (MOTHER JONES)

(1837-1930), labor organizer. In addition to her organizing activities among coal miners and others, chiefly on behalf of the United Mine Workers of America, Mother Jones was a popular speaker for social and political causes ranging from the abolition of child labor to the 1910 campaign to free Mexican revolutionaries jailed in the United States. Her political views evolved from 1890s populism to socialism, and from socialism to support for Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic party in 1916.

Mother Jones began organizing coal miners in Pennsylvania sometime in the 1890s. During the 1900 anthracite (hard coal) strike, she was pictured in newspaper accounts as a colorful figure whose grandmotherly looks belied her sharp wit and militant pronouncements. Her strategy during that strike—organizing miners' wives to march over the mountains late at night banging on tin pans with the idea of blocking strikebreakers coming in for the morning shift—characterized her style. She had a knack for organizing public events designed for dramatic effect.

As she began to attract more attention, she skillfully used the news media to further the causes for which she worked. In one effective political pageant in 1903, she organized a highly publicized, week-long march of child mill workers from Pennsylvania to the New York home of President Theodore Roosevelt. The children were physically stunted and mutilated, walking evidence of the abusive conditions of their labor. This was public theater designed to increase general awareness of the need for social justice.

A charismatic speaker, Mother Jones was revered by coal miners and their families, who called her "the miner's angel." Officers of the United Mine Workers of America found her persuasive abilities particularly useful at the inception of strikes, and she played a prominent role in virtually all the important coal strikes of the period. Her physical courage was legendary—stories abounded of how she would wade through freezing creeks or walk up to a mine guard who was threatening to shoot and put her hand on the muzzle of his gun.

Coal operators and their supporters tended to blame her for their labor troubles and for any violence that occurred, but she was not that powerful. Moreover, following union policy, she typically urged strikers to abstain from violence even in the face of provocation. She became familiar with the insides of various jails in West Virginia and Colorado, but her incarcerations generated so much public protest (owing to her age, gender, wit, and ability to attract newspaper attention) that she was able to serve the cause quite as well in jail as out.

She lived a nontraditional life, declaring that she made her home wherever there was a "good fight against wrong." Indeed, she had no permanent home, traveling from region to region to organize coal miners, whom she called "her boys." She often expressed herself in rough, "unwomanly" language. Yet her views on women's roles were entirely traditional: she believed their important work was in the home. (Her own husband and children had died in the Memphis yellow fever epidemic of 1867.) She opposed woman suffrage and looked upon her own activism as that of a mother.

When Mother Jones died in 1930, she quickly faded from public memory, except in coal mining communities. She was at once exceptional and quite typical—of the militant, pro-union coal miner's wife who might curse out a mine guard or beat up a strikebreaker but who also cherished her traditional role in the family.

Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (1989); Edward M. Steel, ed., The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones (1988).

Priscilla Long

See also Labor; Radicalism.