Kathlyn Gay

Chapter 1 excerpt

She was a small woman—not more than five feet tall, and she quickly took her place on a makeshift platform that had been set up in the public square by the court house in Charleston, West Virginia. It was September 6, 1912, and a crowd of striking miners had gathered. Mary Jones examined her audience through her wire-rimmed glasses. She wore a long black dress with lace at the neck... She appeared to be someone’s grandmother preparing to talk to a class of students. But her words soon belied the image. She began in a low voice, and the audience hushed to listen intently. All could hear Mary Jones’ indignation, her quiet fury as she spoke: This great gathering that is here tonight signals there is a disease in the State that must be wiped out. The people have suffered from that disease patiently; they have borne insults, oppression, outrages; they appealed to their chief executive, they appealed to the courts, they appealed to the attorney general, and in every case they were turned down. They were ignored.

In her speech, Mary Jones urged miners to stand up and agitate against the “disease.” She was referring to the mining company owners and government officials who did nothing to better working conditions in mines, which had long been deplorable. Men and young boys worked long hours underground for meager pay. Most miners’ families lived in miserable poverty, and Jones would often visit them to provide whatever money, food, and clothing she could spare. Because of her concern, miners called her “Mother Jones.” In fact, working men and women in many parts of the United States considered her a protective mother or angel.

For most of her adult life, Mary Harris Jones agitated and organized on behalf of industrial workers. Although she dressed conservatively, she acted in unconventional ways. She often addressed a group of workers, using fiery language--sometimes saying she was there to raise hell. She scolded, cajoled, and demanded that laborers work together through unions for their own and their families’ welfare... this was a dangerous job for anyone during the industrial revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

As Mary Jones pointed out in her autobiography published in 1925: “In all the great industrial centers the working class was in rebellion.... Throughout the country, there was business depression and much unemployment. In the cities, there was hunger and rags and despair.” In mining country, there were not only rebellions but also brutal conflicts between miners and mining company officials, whether in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, southern Illinois, Colorado, or elsewhere. Jones not only spoke to miners but also to factory, textile, railroad, and steel workers, and laborers of all types across the United States. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was an outspoken activist on behalf of the poor and one of the most inspiring labor leaders in U.S. history. She worked among and with laboring people not in an office sheltered from the daily fight for survival. At the beginning of her autobiography, Mary Harris declares “I was born in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1830.” But some historians contend that this is not the actual date of Mary’s birth. Rather it is a date she picked later in her life in order to maintain her role as an elderly firebrand. Historical documents such as court records and school certificates indicate Mary was born in 1836 or 1837, or perhaps even later, in 1843...

In spite of confusion regarding Mary’s early years, there is no doubt that she grew up in an atmosphere of protest and political turmoil. Mary’s father was a tenant farmer who struggled to provide for his wife and four other children besides Mary. Like other poor farmers, or “peasants” as they were called, Richard Harris rented a small plot of land in the village of Inchigeelagh (pronounced Inch ee gee lah, with a hard g as in girl), where he grew a few vegetable crops, primarily potatoes. Inchigeelagh is where Mary’s older brother, Richard Jr., was born and baptized.

Tenant farmers paid their rent with the crops they grew and sold. The British owned most of the Irish farmland, and many landowners, the so-called “gentry,” were Protestants, many of whom lived in England. Under British rule, Irish Catholics were not allowed to buy land and could not enter any profession.

When Richard Harris could no longer support his family in the rural village, he moved them to the seaport town of Cork where Mary’s younger siblings—Catherine (1840), Ellen (1845), and William (1846)—were born. They lived in a crowded section of the city, where many other poor Irish families settled. But Harris managed to keep his Inchigeelagh land to grow food, and the family went back and forth from town to the countryside as the seasons dictated...

Richard Harris and his eldest son were among millions of Irish who fled their homeland during the mid-1800s because of a potato famine. Potatoes were the staple food in Ireland, and loss of the crop created great devastation for years. It began with a fungus-like blight of the potato crop. After potatoes were dug from the ground, they soon began to decay, turning into a black. The crops that poor Irish farmers stored in cellars rotted away, so they had no way to pay their rent let alone have food for survival. Some tried to eat the rotten food but soon became ill, dying from typhus and cholera.

During this time, landowners evicted masses of Irish peasants from their pitiable mud homes because they could not pay the rents. Many evicted families crowded into workhouses, which bred disease and resulted in more deaths... Hundreds of thousands of Irish sought homes in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. They made the ocean crossing in the cargo area of flimsy ships that soon became known as “coffin ships” because so many emigrants died on the way...

Mary’s father and brother were fortunate to survive their trip to North America, and find a place to live in a Burlington, Vermont, boarding house not far from the Canadian border. Like many other immigrants, the father and son found jobs as laborers with a railroad construction crew, and Richard Harris became a naturalized U.S. citizen. By the time Harrises had earned enough money to pay for their family’s passage across the Atlantic, they were working with the railroad crew in Canada, and the Harris family reunited in Toronto, Ontario, just over the U.S.-Canadian border.

Years later in a speech, Mary told a newspaper reporter that her first battle as an industrial organizer was when she was a young girl and her father was working for the Grand Trunk railroad. She explained that no law forced companies to pay workers, and bosses would “hire the men and keep them two months without a penny of wages and then they would go away and never pay the men. And I happened to be one of the victims, as the child of my father who was not paid.” Mary said she knew that the man responsible for paying wages lived “out on the edge of town, in a very comfortable place, and I organized an army of girls and we went out there, and I made that fellow pay us the money that he owed us.”