The drive south from Chicago on Int. Hwy. 55 is flat and uneventful for about 250 miles. Then around Mt. Olive and White City the terrain suddenly dips and swells, and you are in what used to be coal country. Fifteen mines once operated within five miles of these towns. Now there are none. All that remains to recall those days are the hills and old Slavic men with black lung disease and the grave of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.
The woman once called “the Chicago virago” by the New York Times and “the most dangerous woman in the world” by a West Virginia prosecutor now lies in the bucolic Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive.
More than 50 years ago, in 1936, 50,000 people jammed this Illinois town to dedicate a 20-foot-tall granite obelisk to Jones. At the time, her fame was such that Gene Autry had recorded a song about her. Today, cemetery officials say the number of visitors to the tomb, flanked by two bronze statues of miners, has dwindled to only a handful a year.
In her heyday, roughly the first 30 years of this century, Mother Jones was a folk hero before women had the vote. She was an inspirational labor organizer and a powerful rhetorician, particularly for the right of child laborers. She spoke with presidents, worked with Mexican revolutionaries and traveled the U.S. bolstering strikes.
“They called her a Communist, but she was nothing like that,” said Pete Magdich, one of a group of miners and miners’ children who manage the cemetery in Mt. Olive. “It was just the way she’d say things.”
Mother Jones was well into her 70s when she began “saying things.” Her stocky 5-foot frame in black dress and bonnet and her fiery oratory quickly became legendary. She claimed to have been born on May 1, 1830, in Cork, Ireland. Though the date has been disputed, biographers generally have stuck by it. Her birthday, then, coincides with two important labor dates: the
“Internationale” or May Day celebrated by Communists in commemoration of the 1880 world Socialist labor congress, and the anniversary of the strike in Chicago for an eight-hour work day that led to the Haymarket Riot on May 4, which Jones witnessed.
Speculation about how she acquired the name “Mother” varies. West Virginia historian Lois McLean says the first instance was probably at the Pullman strike in 1894 in Chicago. “They supposedly started calling her ‘mother’ because of her appearance,” McLean says. “Back then it was just a term of affection or respectful address. She was more than ‘Mrs. Jones.’ ” Jones’ autobiography is full of hyperbole and half-truths, but it is true that she lived during brutal times for unionism. Her own life was hard. At age 37, she watched her husband and four young children die of yellow fever during an epidemic in Memphis.
Before the Chicago Fire in 1871, which she witnessed, Jones had a dress shop on Washington Street near the lake. Already she had developed the sense of injustice that would make her famous. In her autobiography she writes of this period: “Often, while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in the 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.”
The Chicago Knights of Labor was the first union to which Jones belonged. From all accounts, she was not an ideologue. She never adhered to any one political philosophy. Instead, she has been described as a maverick, an idealist who never broke into the ranks of union leadership. She seems to have been motivated by a keen sense of fair play mixed with religion.
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Despite her avowed disdain for politics, Jones had a knack for organizing spectacles that would make a campaign manager proud. She rose to prominence in a society in which violence was commonplace. In 1903, Jones marched a rag-tag band of child textile-mill workers from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home on Long Island. Although the president refused to see her, her stops in Princeton and New York City garnered enough publicity that the Pennsylvania legislature enacted child labor laws that were copied in other states.
Jones watched scores of miners being shot to death by company scabs. She repeatedly urged “her boys” to buy guns. One of the earliest bloody mine incidents that influenced Jones’ career was in downstate Virden. In 1898, four miners were shot to death by hired guards. They were denied burial in local cemeteries, so the miners bought an acre of land apart from the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive.
“Bury me with my boys in Mt. Olive, and let no traitor draw breath over my grave,” she is reported to have said. Those words are inscribed on the monument.
Although she chose to be buried in Illinois, Jones did most of her work in Colorado and West Virginia, where most of the labor carnage occurred.
In West Virginia, in 1912, Jones is said to have held up a bloody coat worn by a wounded mine guard, declaring, “This is the first damned mine guard’s coat decorated to suit me.” She then allegedly cut the coat into pieces and threw them to her audience to wear as lapel emblems.
Jones was not a feminist by today’s standards. She opposed women’s suffrage, believing that women had enough responsibilities “rearing rising generations.” Ten years after women got the right to vote, when she was 100, she railed against women’s entry into clubs and politics. Jones disliked being called a “lady.” She argued that “God almighty created women, and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
Jones was not above exploiting femininity for her causes. In 1910 she devised a strategy to spring a group of miners’ wives from the Greensburg, Pa., jail. She had instructed the women to bring their babies into the jail with them, to tell the jailers that they couldn’t afford nannies. Then she told them to sing loud, incessant “lullabies” to their children. A racket of wailing issued all night, and in the morning the neighbors begged the judge to free the women.
Modern-day labor leaders generally agree that their members have little knowledge of Mother Jones or the agitation that marked the early days of organized labor. Ron Martin, field representative for the Midwest region of the AFL-CIO, says the union offers labor history seminars. “We are trying to reeducate our membership who don’t know where their benefits came from,” he says.
One clear sign of the fading memory of Mother Jones is at the U.S. Department of Labor. A bust of Mother Jones is said to have stood in the foyer of the building, but it has long since disappeared. Labor Department historian Judson McLaury says he has searched for the piece but is unable to document its existence.
But in Mt. Olive, where vending machines on Main Street still have soda for a quarter, Mother Jones is remembered. The adults here recall being let out of school every Oct. 12 to march in a parade that ended with speeches at the miners’ cemetery. Here, the children of the miners who marched with and buried Mother Jones still tend her memory with a history room at the public library.
Librarian Violet Krivi, 71, says her father entered the coal mines when he was in 3d grade and stayed there for 57 years. Her husband, who suffers from black lung disease, also worked in the mines for 27 years, until they closed. “She was like a saint to them,” Krivi said.
The Oct. 12 holiday passed away with the passing of the mines, and now only a handful of miners and labor history buffs make the trek to Mother Jones’ tomb each year. “We don’t really hold any day anymore,” said Tony Hrebik, 79, who started working in the mines in 1927 and who guarded Jones’ body when it lay in state in 1930. “We don’t get enough people out here. I say it’s a disgrace to her.”
Hrebik is a living testament to the dangers of mine work. He is crippled from breaking his legs 11 times in coal falls, and he lost an eye in a mine accident. But by the time of his first injury, in 1936, companies had begun to offer disability payments.
Pete Magdich, 74, whose father was crippled in a coal fall in the early 1920s, would like to see more tourists attracted to the Mother Jones monument. He has worked to get a sign erected on I-55 but was told that the state will finance signs only after more than 200,000 people annually visit a site. So he is collecting private money for the project.
“There are thousands of dedicated miners and union people who pass by. If they had seen a sign off the highway indicating this is her burial place, I feel certain they would have stopped,” Magdich said. “Many of the miners, the dedicated union members, don’t even know this fair lady is buried here.” Fair woman, that is.
Nina Burleigh is a Chicago freelance writer.