Mother Jones, Workers Resistance, and the Origins of Rank-and-File Unionism
by Rosemary Feurer
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was a fearless fighter for workers' rights who shaped the concept of "rank-and-file unionism." When she was mocked as the "grandmother of all agitators," in the U.S. Senate, Mother Jones replied that she would someday like to be called "the great-grandmother of all agitators." And she is. She taught us that movements are theatres of battle, that strategy matters, and that unions can be vehicles for workers' power, not just a contract.
Mary Harris' early life was shaped by famine, fever and fire. She was born in 1837 in Cork, Ireland, enduring the Great Hunger where she witnessed starved corpses carted off while food was taken to the ports of the Lee River to be exported. Harris immigrated to Canada and then the U.S., earning a living as a teacher and seamstress, then moving to Memphis where she married union iron molder George Jones and started a family. But when yellow fever struck the city, "the rich and the well-to-do fled the city", while workers like her husband perished from it, and then "one by one my four little children sickened and died. . . I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could." Jones then moved to Chicago, where she sewed for the wealthy until the Great Fire of 1871 made her homeless.
'MOTHER' OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONS
It was in the midst of this campaign that Jones landed in the heart of the 1897 great coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania. There she implemented strategies of family and community organizing as a foundational aspect of a rank-and-file unionism. The strike included union encampments styled on the unemployed movement, calls for a general strike (which the AFL derailed), and defiance of injunctions by putting women and children on the front lines. Massive marches and rallies, without precedent in Pennsylvania, Illinois and West Virginia, threw down the gauntlet for this new style of unionism. She reminded them that they were part of a longer history of struggle, one that had to have broad goals: "I long to see the day when labor will be in the White House and in the halls of Congress," and "We'll take the mines and run them for ourselves, rather than starve." Her key message was for the women. She advised them to organize independently of the men, to defy their husbands and fathers if necessary, to deny miners access to the home, and to "shorten their skirts and march." They did and became part of the organized theatre of battle.
FIGHTER FOR EQUALITY
Jones was also a transnational organizer who believed in a global labor movement. By 1910 she was the most well-known U.S. figure fighting for Mexican labor revolutionaries against the Diaz dictatorship and his U.S. corporate and political supporters. The Mexican rebels were part of the same cause as American unionists, she argued. When she traveled to Mexico in 1921, workers threw red carnations and blue violets around Jones, who they called Madre Juanita, until she was covered up to her shoulders.
Jones believed in democratic unionism, and that brought her into conflict with United Mine Workers union officials, especially John L. Lewis, whom she felt was stifling the voice of the ordinary miner. As she neared death at age 93, she declared she was still "a radical" who "longed for the day when labor will have the destination of the nation in her own hands, and she will stand a united force, and show the world what the workers can do." She asked to be buried in the Union Miners' Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, established as the resting place of rank-and-file unionists who had died in a shoot-out with company gun thugs in 1898. Tens of thousands of workers showed up to pay their respects when she was buried.
LEARN MORE
Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliot Gorn (2002) is her most thorough biography. Other books about Jones are included in the Bibliography section of the Mother Jones Museum website.
Learn much more about our union heritage at the largest labor history site in the U.S., also run by Rosemary Feurer, Labor History Links.
(History from the UE News website: http://www.ueunion.org/uenewsupdates.html?news=732)