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Mother Jones: The "Miners' Angel" - Part I - Page 2

© Mara Lou Hawse

Life was relatively good for Mary Harris Jones until 1867. That year, when she was 37 years 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. Four years later, in 1871, she lost everything in the great Chicago fire. That event changed her life drastically. As she recovered, she became involved in the labor movement and began to attend meetings of the newly formed Knights of Labor.

Fetherling believes that Jones's interest in the labor movement really began when she sewed for wealthy Chicago families. According to him, 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."

The early Knights of Labor, with their ideals and their sense of fraternity, fulfilled some need within Jones and fitted with what she had learned from her husband. According to Fetherling, "Coming, as it did, on top of successive personal tragedies, the experience [with the Knights of Labor] forged an amalgam of compassion and fervor which would serve her well in industrial wars over the next half a century." Wherever there were labor troubles, there was Mother Jones - the "Miners' Angel."

Jones apparently continued to work as a seamstress in Chicago for two or three years after the fire. She had no fixed home, but she made Chicago her base as she traveled back and forth across the country, from industrial area to industrial area. Asked where she lived, she replied: "Well, wherever there is a fight." She lived with the workers, in tent colonies or in shanty towns, near the mills or in the coal fields. As Fetherling pointed out, "In lieu of a family, she would adopt America's toilers, and they would call her 'Mother.'"

While Jones 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 workers changed. Waves of immigrants and displaced farmers entered America's industrial workforce. All too often, they received starvation wages and worked under nightmarish conditions. "Within these men smoldered the sparks of class conflict which Mother Jones would fan for 50 years. To those workers, she would become an anchor to the past and an arrow toward a better future." Her skill lay in her ability to buoy the workers up and goad them to fight, even when the battle seemed hopeless.

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