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[Illustration: Mother Jones’ Latest Photograph]
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES
EDITED BY MARY FIELD PARTON
INTRODUCTION BY CLARENCE DARROW
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1925
Copyright, 1925, by
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
Press of
John F. Higgins,
376 W. Monroe St.,
INTRODUCTION
Mother Jones is one of the most forceful and picturesque figures of the
American labor movement. She is a born crusader. In an earlier period
of the world she would have joined with Peter the Hermit in leading
the crusaders against the Saracens. At a later period, she would have
joined John Brown in his mad, heroic effort to liberate the slaves.
Like Brown, she has a singleness of purpose, a personal fearlessness
and a contempt for established wrongs. Like him, the purpose was the
moving force, and the means of accomplishing the end did not matter.
In her early life, she found in the labor movement an outlet for her
inherent sympathy and love and daring. She never had the time or the
education to study the philosophy of the various movements that from
time to time have inspired the devoted idealist to lead what seemed to
be a forlorn hope to change the institutions of men.
Mother Jones is essentially an individualist. Her own emotions and
ideas are so strong that she is sometimes in conflict with others,
fighting for the same cause. This too is an old story; the real leaders
of any cause are necessarily individualists and are often impatient
of others who likewise must go in their own way. All movements
attract men and women of various minds. The early abolitionists could
not agree as to methods. In their crusade were found the men who
believed in constitutional methods, such as Giddings and Lincoln; the
men who believed in force, of which John Brown was the chief; the
non-resistant, like William Lloyd Garrison; the lone individualist who
hit wherever he found a head to hit, like Wendell Phillips. Mother
Jones is the Wendell Phillips of the labor movement. Without his
education and scholarship, she has the power of moving masses of men by
her strong, living speech and action. She has likewise his disregard
for personal safety. After the capture of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry,
many real abolitionists were paralyzed with fear and fled from the
field, but Wendell Phillips hurled his phillipics from the housetops
and defied his enemies to do their worst.
In all her career, Mother Jones never quailed or ran away. Her deep
convictions and fearless soul always drew her to seek the spot where
the fight was hottest and the danger greatest.
I never personally knew anything of her misunderstandings with John
Mitchell, but it seems only fair for me to say that I was associated
with him for many months in the arbitration growing out of the coal
strike. We were friends for many years and he always had my full
respect and trust. I cannot help feeling that both were true and
that the disagreements were only such as inevitably grow out of close
association of different types of mind in a great conflict.
Mother Jones was always doubtful of the good of organized institutions.
These require compromises and she could not compromise. To her there
was but one side. Right and wrong were forever distinct. The type is
common to all great movements. It is essentially the difference between
the man of action and the philosopher. Both are useful. No one can
decide the relative merits of the two.
This little book is a story of a woman of action fired by a fine zeal.
She defied calumny. She was not awed by guns or jails. She kept on her
way regardless of friends and foes. She had but one love to which she
was always true and that was her cause. People of this type are bound
to have conflicts within and without the ranks.
Mother Jones was especially devoted to the miners. The mountainous
country, the deep mines, the black pit, the cheap homes, the danger,
the everlasting conflict for wages and for life, appealed to her
imagination and chivalry. Much of the cause of trades unionism in
England and America has been associated with the mines. The stories
of the work of women and children in the mines of Great Britain are
well known to all trades unionists. The progress of trades unionism
in England was largely the progress of the miners’ cause. The fight
in America has been almost a replica of the contest in Great Britain.
Through suffering, danger and loyalty the condition of the miners
has gradually improved. Some of the fiercest combats in America have
been fought by the miners. These fights brought thousands of men and
their families close to starvation. They brought contests with police,
militia, courts and soldiers. They involved prison sentences, massacres
and hardships without end. Wherever the fight was the fiercest and
danger the greatest, Mother Jones was present to aid and cheer. In both
the day and the night, in the poor villages and at the lonely cabin
on the mountain side, Mother Jones always appeared in time of need.
She had a strong sense of drama. She staged every detail of a contest.
Her actors were real men and women and children, and she often reached
the hearts of employers where all others failed. She was never awed by
jails. Over and over she was sentenced by courts; she never ran away.
She stayed in prison until her enemies opened the doors. Her personal
non-resistance was far more powerful than any appeal to force.
This little book gives her own story of an active, dramatic life. It is
a part of the history of the labor movement of the United States.
CLARENCE DARROW.
Chicago, June 6th, 1925.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Early Years 11
II. The Haymarket Tragedy 17
III. A Strike in Virginia 24
IV. Wayland’s Appeal to Reason 28
V. Victory at Arnot, Pennsylvania 30
VI. War in West Virginia 40
VII. A Human Judge 49
VIII. Roosevelt Sent for John Mitchell 56
IX. Murder in West Virginia 63
X. The March of the Mill Children 71
XI. “Those Mules Won’t Scab Today” 84
XII. How the Women Mopped Up Coaldale 89
XIII. The Cripple Creek Strike 94
XIV. Child Labor, North and South 114
XV. Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone 132
XVI. The Mexican Revolution 136
XVII. How the Women Sang Themselves Out of Jail 145
XVIII. Victory in West Virginia 148
XIX. Guards and Gunmen 169
XX. Governor Hunt, Human and Just 172
XXI. In Rockefeller’s Prisons 178
XXII. “You Don’t Need a Vote to Raise Hell” 195
XXIII. A West Virginia Prison Camp 205
XXIV. The Steel Strike of 1919 209
XXV. Struggle and Lose: Struggle and Win 227
XXVI. Medieval West Virginia 232
XXVII. Progress in Spite of Leaders 236
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Mother Jones’ Latest Photograph _Frontispiece_
Facing Page
Mother Jones Heading Protest Procession of Strikers
at Denver 102
Mother Jones with the Miners’ Children 128
Mother Jones Doesn’t Need a Vote to Raise Hell 202
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
I was born in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1830. My people were poor.
For generations they had fought for Ireland’s freedom. Many of my folks
have died in that struggle. My father, Richard Harris, came to America
in 1835, and as soon as he had become an American citizen he sent for
his family. His work as a laborer with railway construction crews took
him to Toronto, Canada. Here I was brought up but always as the child
of an American citizen. Of that citizenship I have ever been proud.
After finishing the common schools, I attended the Normal school
with the intention of becoming a teacher. Dress-making too, I
learned proficiently. My first position was teaching in a convent in
Monroe, Michigan. Later, I came to Chicago and opened a dress-making
establishment. I preferred sewing to bossing little children.
However, I went back to teaching again, this time in Memphis,
Tennessee. Here I was married in 1861. My husband was an iron moulder
and a staunch member of the Iron Moulders’ Union.
In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept Memphis. Its victims were mainly
among the poor and the workers. The rich and the well-to-do fled the
city. Schools and churches were closed. People were not permitted to
enter the house of a yellow fever victim without permits. The poor
could not afford nurses. Across the street from me, ten persons lay
dead from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night
quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping
and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children sickened
and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial.
My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of
grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken
as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the
wheels of the death cart.
After the union had buried my husband, I got a permit to nurse the
sufferers. This I did until the plague was stamped out.
I returned to Chicago and went again into the dressmaking business
with a partner. We were located on Washington Street near the lake. We
worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to
observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. Often while sewing
for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake
Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the
poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen
lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical
comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers
seemed neither to notice nor to care.
Summers, too, from the windows of the rich, I used to watch the mothers
come from the west side slums, lugging babies and little children,
hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air from the lake. At night, when
the tenements were stifling hot, men, women and little children slept
in the parks. But the rich, having donated to the charity ice fund,
had, by the time it was hot in the city, gone to seaside and mountains.
In October, 1871, the great Chicago fire burned up our establishment
and everything that we had. The fire made thousands homeless. We stayed
all night and the next day without food on the lake front, often going
into the lake to keep cool. Old St. Mary’s church at Wabash Avenue and
Peck Court was thrown open to the refugees and there I camped until I
could find a place to go.
Near by in an old, tumbled down, fire scorched building the Knights of
Labor held meetings. The Knights of Labor was the labor organization
of those days. I used to spend my evenings at their meetings, listening
to splendid speakers. Sundays we went out into the woods and held
meetings.
Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor. Those were the
days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers,
no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of the
martyrs and the saints.
I became acquainted with the labor movement. I learned that in 1865,
after the close of the Civil War, a group of men met in Louisville,
Kentucky. They came from the North and from the South; they were the
“blues” and the “greys” who a year or two before had been fighting
each other over the question of chattel slavery. They decided that the
time had come to formulate a program to fight another brutal form of
slavery--industrial slavery. Out of this decision had come the Knights
of Labor.
From the time of the Chicago fire I became more and more engrossed in
the labor struggle and I decided to take an active part in the efforts
of the working people to better the conditions under which they worked
and lived. I became a member of the Knights of Labor.
One of the first strikes that I remember occurred in the Seventies.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees went on strike and they sent
for me to come help them. I went. The mayor of Pittsburgh swore in as
deputy sheriffs a lawless, reckless bunch of fellows who had drifted
into that city during the panic of 1873. They pillaged and burned
and rioted and looted. Their acts were charged up to the striking
workingmen. The governor sent the militia.
The Railroads had succeeded in getting a law passed that in case of a
strike, the train-crew should bring in the locomotive to the roundhouse
before striking. This law the strikers faithfully obeyed. Scores of
locomotives were housed in Pittsburgh.
One night a riot occurred. Hundreds of box cars standing on the tracks
were soaked with oil and set on fire and sent down the tracks to the
roundhouse. The roundhouse caught fire. Over one hundred locomotives,
belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were destroyed. It was a
wild night. The flames lighted the sky and turned to fiery flames the
steel bayonettes of the soldiers.
The strikers were charged with the crimes of arson and rioting,
although it was common knowledge that it was not they who instigated
the fire; that it was started by hoodlums backed by the business men
of Pittsburgh who for a long time had felt that the Railroad Company
discriminated against their city in the matter of rates.
I knew the strikers personally. I knew that it was they who had tried
to enforce orderly law. I knew they disciplined their members when they
did violence. I knew, as everybody knew, who really perpetrated the
crime of burning the railroad’s property. Then and there I learned in
the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others’
sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.
These early years saw the beginning of America’s industrial life. Hand
and hand with the growth of factories and the expansion of railroads,
with the accumulation of capital and the rise of banks, came anti-labor
legislation. Came strikes. Came violence. Came the belief in the hearts
and minds of the workers that legislatures but carry out the will of
the industrialists.