Mother Jones: The "Miners' Angel" - Part II
Mother Jones was noted for attracting publicity and attention from the government for the workers' cause. One of her best-known activities was leading a march of miners' wives "who routed strikebreakers with brooms and mops in the Pennsylvania coal fields in 1902"; another, in 1903, was leading the "children's crusade," a caravan of striking children from the textile mills of Kensington, Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt's home in Long Island, New York; she wanted to dramatize the case for abolishing child labor.
Jones went on to participate in 1915 and 1916 in the strikes of garment workers and streetcar workers in New York, and in the strike of steel workers in Pittsburgh in 1919. In January 1921, at the age of 91, as a guest of the Mexican government, she traveled to Mexico to attend the Pan-American Federation of Labor meeting. According to one writer, "It was the high point of recognition in her role in the labor movement."
In 1922 Mother Jones left the United Mine Workers. She disagreed with the policies of John L. Lewis, and Lewis did not reappoint her as an organizer. However, Jones continued to speak when her health permitted. Her last known public address was in Alliance, Ohio, in 1926, when she was the guest of honor at a Labor Day celebration. Her last public appearance was at her 100th birthday party, May 1, 1930, at a reception in Silver, Spring, Maryland. She read congratulatory messages and "made a fiery speech for the motion-picture camera."
Mother Jones lived an incredible life. As biographer Dale Fetherling points out, she "was born . . . less than 50 years after the end of the American Revolution. Yet, she died on the eve of the New Deal. She was alive when Andrew Jackson was president, and she sometimes quoted from speeches she heard Lincoln make. As an adult she knew the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. She rode in automobiles, and she saw the railroads link the oceans. She saw and was seen in films and came to know the everyday use of the telephone, the electric light, and the radio. She watched unions grow from secret groups of hunted men to what she feared was a complacent part of the established order. . . . It may have been a good time to live in America. But it also was a time in which one needed to
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