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A CELEBRATION OF MOTHER JONES' LIFE AT MT OLIVE
by John J. Dunphy
The tiny town of Mt. Olive, Illinois, located about 40 miles northeast of St. Louis, is the site of the Union Miners Cemetery, the only union-owned cemetery in the United States. It is appropriate that it is the resting place of Mary "Mother" Jones, one of the giants of the American labor movement.
In her 1925 autobiography, Jones stated that she was born Mary Harris near Cork, Ireland on May Day 1830. Many scholars now believe that she was actually born on August 1, 1837. By claiming May Day - a day that celebrates international labor solidarity - as her birthday, Jones might have been expressing her kinship with all working women and men.
After immigrating to the United States, Jones worked as a teacher and seamstress until her 1861 marriage to George Jones, an iron-molder and union member. In a tragedy that would redefine her life, George Jones and all four of their children died in 1867 during a yellow fever epidemic while the family was living in Memphis.
Mary Jones moved to Chicago to work as a seamstress. But tragedy struck again and she lost everything she owned in the Great Fire of 1871.
Now without family or possessions, Jones came to identify with the oppressed, poverty-stricken American workers who were so brutally exploited by powerful corporations. The woman who had lost her children now became a "mother" to the fledgling American labor movement.
In 1894 Jones got a job in an Alabama cotton mill to investigate child labor. She discovered boys and girls who had suffered crushed hands and amputated fingers while cleaning and oiling dangerous machinery.
"Tiny babies of six years with faces of sixty did an eight-hour shift for ten cents a day," she reported. "If they fell asleep, cold water was dashed on their faces."
After years of free-lance labor activism, Jones was hired by the United Mine Workers in 1897 as a salaried orgnaizer. Her militancy and fearlessness as she fought to organize miners became legendary.
Confronting armed company goons in West Virginia, Jones placed her hand over the muzzle of their machine gun and warned them that, if they began firing, 500 armed miners "will finish the game." Jones also organized miners' wives into women's brigades who stood watch at strike-closed mines. When scabs approached on mule-driven wagons to reopen the mines, the women beat on pots and pans to panic the animals into bolting away.
Jones asked Pennsylvania newspaper reporters during a 1903 textile workers strike why they didn't write about the horrors of child labor. The reporters admitted that the mill owners held stock in the newspapers and were able to control what was published.
Jones replied, "I've got stock in these children and will arrange a little publicity." She organized a march of child laborers from the Kensington mills near Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's summer home on Long Island.
When she was invited to address a Princeton University economics class during this march, she brought along a ten-year-old boy and admonished the students, "Here's a textbook in economics." She noted that the malnourished lad, whose spine
was curved from carrying 75-pound bundles of yarn, was paid $3 a week in wages.
During a 1914 miners' strike in Colorado, Jones was arrested and held incommunicado. She managed to smuggle out a letter in which she proclaimed that "not even incarceration in a damp, underground dungeon will make me give up the fight...for the rights of the working people."
Jones died on November 30, 1930. It was her request to be buried in the Union Miners Cemetery near some miners who were murdered by company goons during a strike at Virden, Illinois in 1898. In 1936, a granite monument 22 feet high on a 28 by 18 foot base, weighing a total of 80 tons, was erected on her grave site by the Progressive Miners of America.
Many contemporary Ameircans - even union members - are unfamiliar with Jones' legacy. An upcoming festival in Mt. Olive, however, was created to change that.
A coalition of organizations and local businesses will sponsor the first annual Mother Jones Festival on June 24-26 at Mt. Olive. The festival will include labor artifacts and displays illustrating American labor history and the career of Mother Jones.
Jones once counseled American workers to "Mourn for the dead but fight like hell for the living." Activists in this era of predatory corporations, trickle-down economics and an increasingly frayed social safety net would do well to heed her advice.
This article was published on the Commentary (Op-Ed) Page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2005.
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