Mother jones monument biography book

A life touched by tragedy and deprivation--childhood in her native Ireland ending with the potato famine, immigration to Canada and then to the United States, marriage followed by the deaths of her husband and four children from yellow fever, and the destruction of her dressmaking business in the great Chicago fire of 1871--forged the stalwart labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones into a force to be reckoned with.

Radicalized in a brutal era of repeated violence against hard-working men and women, Mother Jones crisscrossed the country to demand higher wages and safer working conditions. Her activism in support of American workers began after the age of sixty. The grandmotherly persona she projected won the hearts, and her stirring rhetoric the minds, of working people. She made herself into a national symbol of resistance to tyranny. Sometimes exaggerating her own experiences, she fought for justice in mines, factories, and workshops across the nation. For her troubles she was condemned as "the most dangerous woman in America."

At her death in 1930 at the age of ninety-three, thousands paid tribute at a Washington, D.C., memorial service, and again at her burial in the only union-owned cemetery in America in the small mining town of Mount Olive, Illinois.

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History in the Margins

It’s Labor Day here in the United States.  One of the things I do to celebrate is to share a post from the past about major players in the early American labor movement.  I think it’s important to remember that the labor movement fought hard for many things we shouldn’t take for granted, like  a safe workplace, child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, and paid time off.

This year, I want to return to a post from 2022:  the story of Mary Harris Jones, known in her time as Mother Jones

Driving from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks and back over the last years,(1) I have passed the sign for the Mother Jones monument many, many times. It is a plain, almost amateurish, sign, without the official imprimatur(2) of a brown tourist attraction sign(3) or the flash of billboard advertising a show in Branson. Nothing about it is designed to lure a curious history bugg off the highway. And up to now, we have not been lured.

That changed this year, thanks to an information panel in an Illinois highway rest stop.(4) My Own True Love and I were hooked.

I had been vaguely aware that Mother Jones was a union organizer, but I had no idea how important she was at her time.

Mother Jones was in some ways the Gr