MOTHER JONES INTERVIEW
The questions asked of Mother Jones by the reporter. (added 9/30/2003)
Introduction
We
are honored tonight to have the opportunity to meet one of the most influential
women in the history of the labor movement. Born in
A
fiery and electrifying speaker, Mother Jones specialized in creating public
outcry over the inhuman treatment of workers. She once put together a caravan of
children on a march to dramatize the evils of child labor. Her most famous
efforts were attempts to organize the miners of
Questions from the reporter.
1. Can you tell us something about your childhood and your life prior to becoming an advocate for the labor movement?
I was born in Cork, Ireland on May 1, 1830 and I come from a long line of agitators. When I was a child, I watched British soldiers march through the streets with the heads of Irishmen stuck on their bayonets. My grandfather, an Irish freedom fighter, was hanged. My father, Richard Harris, was forced to flee Ireland when he was accused of agitating against Ireland’s British colonial government. In 1835, he made his way to the United States and by 1841 he saved up the money for my mother, Ellen and four siblings to come to Canada. I spent my childhood in Toronto, Canada, where my father found work on the railroad.
I trained to be a teacher in Toronto, but Toronto public schools did not allow the hiring of Catholic teachers. I left for the United States and out this experience in the back of my mind as another example of the powerful against the weak. I moved around the United States for a while, teaching and working as a seamstress.
In 1860, I met and married George Jones, an ironworker, and settled in Memphis, Tennessee. Like my father, George held left-wing political views and was an active member of the Iron Molders Union. With my husband, I received my first exposure to organized labor. The Industrial Revolution had created a system infested with abuse. Much like today, large factory and mine owners were exploiting cheap labor to gain obscene fortunes. Workers were forced to work 12-hour days, seven days a week with none of the benefits you workers take for granted today.
By 1867, my husband and his friends were successful in organizing a branch of the Iron Molders Union. Strangely enough it was Local 66. George and I had some heated discussions about his organizing activities because it was a dangerous thing to be involved in during the second half of the 19th century. The tycoons and captains of industry saw labor unions as something sinister and threatening. They set their minds on exterminating the threat any way they could.
2. How long did your husband remain a member of the Iron Molders Union and did you and George have a family?
My husband didn’t live very long after achieving his victory for the union. The summer of 1867, Yellow Fever struck Memphis. Within seven days, I lost my husband and our four children. At the age of 37, I was all alone in the world. I wanted to lie down and die with them, but there were people that needed my help. I helped to care for the thousands in Memphis that were suffering from yellow fever.
3. After the epidemic, you moved to Chicago. What did you so there?
When I got to Chicago, I worked as a seamstress for the wealthy. I would sit in the windows of their fancy homes sewing and watching shivering, homeless people passing by. Their poverty amidst the living conditions of America’s royalty was horrifying. I started a dress shop in the city, which I had hoped would be successful enough to allow me to stop working in the homes of the wealthy. But misfortune visited me again. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city, including my small dress shop.
The one good thing that came out of working for the wealthy, was that I had found my calling. I had my fill of watching the haves get more and more, while the have-nots got less and less. It wasn’t long before all those haves would know the name of Mother Mary Harris Jones.
4. When did you first become involved in the fight for workers rights?
In 1871 I attended a Knights of Labor meeting and I was so impressed that I decided to dedicate my life to the labor cause. My questions during the meetings caught the attention of the union leaders and I began working for the Knights of Labor full time, delivering speeches whenever labor problems arose. In my forties, I began a career that would make me one of the most loved, and in some cases, the most hated woman in America. I didn’t have a permanent address for the next 50 years; I traveled the country, wherever there was a fight, to organize American workers. My work and dedication to America’s poor would cause female labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, to call me “the greatest woman agitator of that time.
The young men and women whose rights I fought for gave me the nickname “Mother” Jones. I organized workers in nearly every area of American labor in every corner of the country over the next 40 years. The two areas I tended to focus on were child labor and the plight of American’s miners.
5. Why were the miners so important to you?
Even today, mining is, by its nature, a dangerous activity. In the 19th century, when industry had little regulation, it was much more so. The mine owners were the worst when it came to the exploitation of workers. Safety conditions were horrible and the miners lived in drafty shacks owned by the mines and they rented them at very high rates. Mine owners paid their workers in script rather than money, and this script was only good at the mines’ company stores where the owners charged whatever they pleased.
6. Were you involved in any of the strikes against the mine owners?
I was involved in many strikes for the miners in America. There are two that stand out in my mind. One was the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia in 1912. During that strike, men employed by the mine owners machine-gunned down the strikers and their families. When a company guard was murdered, I was arrested and at the age of 83
was found guilty of being involved in the crime and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After a Senate investigation, I was found innocent of the charges and the sentence was overturned. The West Virginia District Attorney, Reese Blizzard, said I was the most dangerous woman in America.
In 1913, I was involved in a yearlong strike by miners in Colorado. I was evicted from mine company property several times, but I kept going back. I was arrested and imprisoned twice. I spent 23 days in the county jail in a basement cell. When 20 people were killed while miners and their families lived in a tent colony in Ludlow, Colorado, I traveled across the country telling the story. President Wilson responded by proposing that the union and the owners agree to a truce and create grievance committees at each mine.
On one of the occasions I was jailed and tried in federal court, the old judge asked me if I read his injunction. I said I did and he asked if I noticed the injunction told me not to look at the mines and did I look at them. I said I certainly did. He asked why did I look at the mines after being ordered not to and I said because there was a judge bigger than him and he gave me my eyesight and I am going to look at whatever I want to.
7. What did you do to open the eyes of the government about the injustices of child labor?
In
April of 1903 I led several hundred children down Independence Square in
Philadelphia hoping to bring attention to child labor. I called the children my
“little gray ghosts” and they were children who had worked in the mills
since the age of six. Many hobbled on crutches, had missing fingers or were
mutilated in some other way. The dangerous conditions and air pollution made
them old before their time. The demonstration caused quite a crowd and I asked
that the government put a stop to sacrificing children on the alter of profit.
We
in the spring of 1903, 75,000 textile workers were on strike. At least 10,000
were little children. They were on strike for more pay and shorter hours. Some
of the children had their lost their hands in the machinery of the textile
mills, some had thumbs missing or their fingers off at the knuckles. They were
stooped over, round-shouldered and skinny. I asked some of their parents if they
would let me have the children for a week or ten days, promising to bring them
back safe and sound. We marched to New York City. We were on our way to see
President Theodore Roosevelt carrying banners that said, “We want time to
play”. At that time there were over 2 million children under the age of 16
working in mills, mines and factories in the United States. We never did get to
see Teddy, but the march helped build support for child labor legislation. I
would like to read the speech I gave when we arrived at the summer home of
President Roosevelt, my plea to end child labor.
Wail of the Children
After a long and weary march, with more miles to travel, we are on our way to see President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. We will ask him to recommend passage of a bill by Congress to protect children against the greed of the manufacturer. We want him to hear the wail of the children, who never have a chance to go to school, but work from ten to eleven hours a day in the textile mills of Philadelphia, weaving the carpets that he and you walk on, and the curtains and clothes of the people.
Fifty years ago, there was a cry against slavery, and the men of the North gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for $2 a week, and even by his parents, to the manufacturer.
Fifty years ago the black babies were sold C.O.D. To-day the white baby is sold to the manufacturer on the installment plan. He might die at his tasks and the manufacturer with the automobile and the yacht and the daughter who talks French to a poodle dog, as you can see any day at Twenty-third Street and Broadway when they roll by, could not afford to pay $2 a week for the child that might die, except on the present installment plan. What the President can do is to recommend a measure and send a message to Congress which will break the chains of the white children slaves.
He endorsed a bill for the expenditure of $45,000 to fill the stomach of a Prince who went gallivanting about the country. We will ask in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones that they be emancipated. I will tell the President that I saw men in Madison Square last night sleeping on the benches and that the country can have not greatness while one unfortunate lies out at night without a bed to sleep on. I will tell him that the prosperity he boasts of is the prosperity of the rich wrung from the poor.
In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect songbirds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?
The trouble is that the fellers in Washington don’t care. I saw them last Winter pass three railroad bills in one hour, and when labor cries for aid for the little ones they turn their backs and will not listen to her.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to get there. He had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he had stolen a railroad he could be a United States Senator. One hour of justice is worth an age of praying.
You are told that every American-born male citizen has a chance of being President. I tell you that the hungry man without a bed in the park would sell his chance for a good square meal, and these little toilers, deformed, dwarfed in body, soul, and morality, with nothing but toil before them and no chance for schooling, don’t even have the dream that they might some day have a chance at the Presidential chair.
You see those monkeys in cages. They are trying to teach them to talk. The monkeys are too wise, for they fear that then the manufacturers might buy them for slaves for their factories. In 1860 the workingmen had the advantage in the percentage of the country’s wealth. To-day statistics at Washington show that with billions of wealth the wage earners’ share is but 10 per cent. We are going to tell the President of these things.
8. Mother Jones, do you have any closing remarks for us?
I have some words for you to remember. Union members today take the benefits we fought and died for, for granted. In 1925 I said these words: “In spite of oppressors, in spite of the false leaders, the cause of the workers continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, slowly his standards of living rise to include some of the good and beautiful things in life. Slowly, those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands”
The Closing
Mother
Jones lived in an incredible era. As biographer Dale Fetherling points out, she
“was born less then 50 years after the end of the American Revolution, yet she
died on the eve of the New Deal. She was alive when Andrew Jackson was
president, and she sometimes quoted from speeches she heard
Burdened
by sickness and old age, Mary Harris Jones died in