Mother Jones: The "Miners' Angel" - Part II
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was there when workers and their families needed support. When there was a strike, she organized and helped the workers; other times, she held educational meetings. In 1877, she helped in the Pittsburgh railway strike, and in 1898 she helped found the Social Democratic Party.
Jones also helped found the International Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies). In 1905, she was the only woman among twenty-seven who signed the manifesto calling for a convention to organize all industrial workers. She later left the organization, but she remained friendly with many of its leaders.
After 1890 Jones became a volunteer organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). She was officially hired in 1900 and attended her first UMWA convention on January 25, 1901. She resigned from the UMWA in 1904 to became a lecturer for the Socialist Party of America, but she returned in 1911. John P. White, the new UMWA president, was an old friend who agreed to let her set her own agenda. In 1923, when she was 93 years old, Jones was still working among striking coal miners in West Virginia.
She came to national attention in 1912-13, during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia. Remembering the lessons learned from her late husband, she often involved the wives and children of miners in activities that dramatized a current situation. On September 21, 1912, she led a march of miners' children through the streets of Charleston, West Virginia; on February 12, 1913, she led a protest about conditions in the strike area and was arrested. She was convicted by a military court of conspiring to commit murder and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Her trial, conviction, and imprisonment created such a furor that the U.S. Senate ordered a committee to investigate conditions in the West Virginia coal fields. However, on May 8, 1913, before the investigation got underway, newly elected governor Hatfield set Mother Jones free. She was 83 years old.
Later in 1913 Jones traveled to Colorado to participate in a year-long strike by miners there. She was evicted from mine company property several times, but returned each time. She was arrested and imprisoned twice: "first for more than two months in relative comfort in the Mt. San Rafael hospital, and again for twenty-three days in the Huerfano County jail in Walsenburg, where the conditions . . . were appalling."
Jones was especially touched by the "machine-gun massacre" of miners and their families in a tent colony at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, when twenty people were killed. She traveled across the country, telling the story. Members of the House Mines and Mining Committee and President Woodrow Wilson responded by proposing that the union and the owners agree to a truce and create a grievance committee at each mine.
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