The Most Dangerous Woman

Mother Jones was a legend of the labor

movement in America as much for her

work as for her legend; both were large.

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.

Little is known about Mary Harris’ life in Cork, where she was born. Her exact birthplace and even the schools she attended are only left to conjecture now, but we know that she emigrated with her family to Canada in the early 1850s, soon after the Famine. This is in direct contrast to her historical life in the United States.
It’s hard to put a timeline on her life because we are not sure even exactly when she was born, but events begin to take shape chronologically as Mary Harris obtains teaching credentials in Toronto, and when her family moves to the United States she begins teaching at a convent in Monroe, Michigan. Soon after, she tired of the teaching profession and began a trek to find herself, first in Chicago, then on to Memphis. In Memphis, she met and married George E. Jones, a member and organizer of the National Union of Iron Moulders, which became the International Molders and Foundry Workers Union of North America in 1861. She opened a Memphis dress shop just as war was breaking out between the States. 

I have been in jail more than once and I expect to go again.

If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. 

The yellow fever came to Memphis, on steamers from New Orleans and points south, before the war in 1855 and again in 1867. Each time was worse than the last, leading up to an 1873 outbreak that overall cost Memphis half its population to disease and flight from the disease, but in 1867 it was confined to the section of the city where it first appeared. It would also claim the lives of Mary’s husband and four children. All four children were under the age of five.

Left with nothing, Mary went back to Chicago and opened another dressmaking business, only this time to lose everything in The Great Chicago Fire, which burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871.

From this loss was born Mother Jones, if not the nickname, the woman who joined an early version of the International Workers of the World, or IWW, not yet in its most famous form. The Knights of Labor, as they were known then, became associated with revolution and anarchy, two issues America was not ready to deal with so soon after Civil War, and Mary eventually wound up with the United Mineworkers Union. Workers were more frequently now hoping to be associated with Unions and not Knights or International images. 

Your organization is not a praying institution.

It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution

right along industrial lines.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!



Many events shaped her work and determination, from a religious upbringing to the Haymarket Riots and railroad strikes. The unions and workers by natural metamorphosis became involved with the American Socialist Party, and so did Mother Jones, which she was referred to for the first time in 1897 (Eric Arnesen, "A Tarnished Icon," Reviews in American History 30, no. 1 (2002): p.89).

 

Reese Blizzard, a West Virginia district

attorney, at her trial in 1902 for ignoring an

injunction banning meetings by striking miners:

“There sits the most dangerous woman in America. She crooks her

finger—twenty thousand contented men lay down.”

She spent her adult life involved in child labor laws through her connection to the Socialist Party, which at the time was at the forefront of the movement to outlaw child labor and put limits on the power of the corporations.   

When she was denounced on the

floor of the United State Senate

as the "grandmother of all agitators."

I hope to live long enough to be

the great-grandmother of all agitators.

She also spent her life moving from one labor strife location to another, when she wasn’t in court standing up for her right to have done so. She left an indelible mark on the corporations she went up against and an inescapable mark on every movement she encouraged.

She will live forever in song, history and hymn.

 

At a 1916 address to a mass meeting of the wives of the striking

streetcar-men in New York City

If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold

I will shout "Freedom for the working class!

 

In this photograph from her autobiography, Mother Jones leads a labor protest march in the heavy snow of the winter of 1914 to

the steps of the state capitol in Denver.



She celebrated her self-proclaimed 100th birthday on May 1, 1930 with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess, on their farm where she lived in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She was filmed making a statement for a newsreel:  

 

She died at the age of 93 (as near as history can determine her age) on November 30, 1930, and was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Ill.

I have never had a vote, and I have

raised hell all over this country.

You don't need a vote to raise hell!

You need convictions and a voice!

Mother Jones in Against The Day
When Frank returns to Denver by way of a caffeine-drenched boat trip to Texas, a state through which the ladies beg him to stay, he looks up from a drink to see his sister Lake’s long ago rejected suitor, Dr. Willlis Turnstone. His partner Dr. Zhao is engaged to Wren, who tells Frank that Estrella is “involved in some mysterious project down in the coalfields.” (996) This reawakens Frank’s revolutionary sensibilities, so of course he heads straight toward the conflict when others would head directly opposite.

The striking mine workers are beginning to swell ranks, and slowly surrounding the area around Ludlow and Walsenburg. Frank makes his way through the “Pinkerton-infested Denver & Rio Grande” (998) railroad highways through backwoods trails into Fort Garland.
Scarsdale Vibe is giving a speech alarmingly prescient of a certain recent “47% speech” to the robber barons at a retreat in the mountains. As Frank and Ewball pull him into their gunsights in Trinidad, they see what might not have been Mother Jones, herself being “invited” to leave town on this next train out. They know she will utilize her friendships to make a show of leaving long enough to “turn around and come right back.” (1004) The description Pynchon provides of her is through Frank’s judge of character, a refined and practiced art Frank came to live by and stay alive by. Frank and Ewball wind up flipping a quarter to decide who will shoot Vibe and who will shoot his bodyguard.

Mother Jones’ presence in Against The Day is Pynchon’s way of letting us know the shit is ready to hit the fan in Ludlow. Mother goes where she needs to be.

Mother with a none too comfortable-looking President Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

 

Sources:

 
http://motherjones175.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/fever/peopleevents/e_1878.html
http://www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Mother%20Jones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84vSVvaGsE4
http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Key-People-in-Labor-History/Mother-Jones-1837-1930
http://notmytribe.com/2009/mother-jones-at-denver-capitol-steps-87481.html