We now know the real Romney. Here's the real Mary Harris (Mother) Jones.

Last edited Wed Sep 19, 2012, 11:57 AM - Edit history (1)

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"Whatever your fight, don't be ladylike". (Mother Jones)

From the first link that showed up, http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2010/03/another-us-radical-mother-jones.html
Mother Jones, once referred to in the US Senate as "the grandmother of all agitators". She was born in Cork, Ireland, daughter and grandaughter of Irish freedom fighters. Her grandfather was hanged; her father, Richard Harris, his wife and family fled to America in 1835. Mother Jones' real name was Mary Harris Jones. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, moved to the US and taught in Michigan and Memphis; worked as a seamstress in Chicago, married George E. Jones, an iron worker and enthusiastic union member, who no doubt helped to form her future passion for justice and improvement in the lives of the poor and working classes.


From "Mother Jones, "The Miners' Angel" by Mara Lou Hawse

Life was relatively good for Mary Harris Jones until 1867. That year, when she was 37years old, within one week her husband and their four small children died in a yellow fever epidemic. After the epidemic had run its course, she returned to Chicago where, once again, she began to work as a dressmaker.
But tragedy followed Mother Jones. Four years later, in 1871, she lost everything she owned in the great Chicago fire. That event also changed her life drastically, and she discovered a new path to follow. She became involved in the labor movement and began to attend meetings of the newly formed Knights of Labor "in an old, tumbled down, fire scorched building."

One biographer believes that Mother Jones's interest in the labor movement really began when she sewed for wealthy Chicago families and observed the blatant economic and social inequities that existed. According to Fetherling, she said: "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 alongside 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......
.....During the time she was most active in the labor movement, the country was changing dramatically, from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. Small enterprises were replaced by large ones.

The nature of work and of workers was altered. Waves of immigrants and displaced farmers dug the nation's coal and forged its steel. All too often, they received in return only starvation wages and nightmarish conditions. Within these men smoldered the sparks of class conflict which Mother Jones would fan for 50 years. To these workers, she would become an anchor to the past and an arrow toward a better future."


She later became a traveling lecturer for the Socialist Party of America, then a co-Founder of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). She left the Socialist Party in 1911 to return to assist in organising the United Mine Workers , and was still working in that capacity in West Virginia at age 93, after a decade earlier having been convicted and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a military court. The then 83-year old battler was set free quite quickly by the new state Governor, after trouble had erupted in the Senate. Later though she was imprisoned on two occasions following strikes and marches, a notable one being to raise awareness about the horrors of child labor and the need for its abolition."


I came upon an autobiography this summer that she wrote when she was already a kupuna, and I have come to love her. Maybe because my own grandfather was an Irish child miner who got out of poverty and took his whole family with him. Here's some more info and her own words, in honor of Mother Jones.

Photos of Mother Jones in the fight to end child labor in the USA. School was only for the well-off back then...sounds like a familiar objective again, right?

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Mother Jones with the miners children

"I met a little trapper boy one day. He was so small that his dinner bucket dragged on the ground.

"How old are you, lad!" I asked him.

"Twelve," he growled as he spat tobacco on the ground.

"Say son," I said, "I'm Mother Jones. You know me, don't you! I know you told the mine foreman you were twelve, but what did you tell the union!"

He looked at me with keen, sage eyes. Life had taught him suspicion and caution.

"Oh, the union’s different. I'm ten come Christmas."

"'Why don't you go to school!"

"Gee," he said-though it was really something stronger – "I ain't lost no leg!" He looked proudly at his little legs.

I knew what he meant: that lads went to school when they were incapacitated by accidents.

And you scarcely blamed the children for preferring mills and mines. The schools were wretched, poorly taught, the lessons dull.

Through the ceaseless efforts of the unions, through continual agitation, we have done away with the most outstanding evils of child labor in the mines. Pennsylvania has passed better and better laws. More and more children are going to school. Better schools have come to the mining districts. We have yet a long way to go. Fourteen years of age is still too young to begin the life of the breaker boy. There is still too little joy and beauty in the miner's life but one who like myself has watched the long, long struggle knows that the end is not yet.

"The governor can stop a strike any time. If I were the governor I would stop a strike by simply saying, "These men have a grievance and demand redress from you. Come and discuss these questions with the miners on the fair soil of America like intelligent, law-abiding citizens. If you refuse I will close up your mines. I will have the state operate mines for the benefit of the nation." It is not right for public officials to bring scabs and gunmen into any state. I am directly opposed to it myself, but if it is a question of strike or you go into slavery, then I say strike until the last one of us drop into our graves."
1913, Speaking to the convention of District 15, UMWA, Trinidad Colorado

The point I take from Mother Jones is that this is a long struggle, and it is our kuleana (responsibility, roughly) to carry it forward so that one day, we will have a just society. As Martin said, maybe not us, maybe not our kids, but one day we will get to the promised land.

Aloha DU, keep fighting. Imua!