Mother of the chapel
The neighbourhood was like a ghost town. Schools and churches had closed. Bodies were taken from the streets and disposed of where they could do no harm to the living. Those with money had fled the city. Those without remained, and prayed that the fever wouldn’t find its way into their home.
It was 1867, America was a few short years out of the Civil War, and a yellow fever epidemic was sweeping through the streets of Memphis, Tennessee.
“The dead surrounded us,” Mary Jones recalled years later. “They were buried at night quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping and the cries of delirium.”
The public was instructed not to enter a house where the fever had hit because of the highly contagious nature of the outbreak. Fear kept Mary Jones in her own home. Fear principally for her family. She had four young children, three girls and a boy, all under the age of five. Her husband George was an iron worker. The family didn’t have much, but at least they had each other.
Some time after noticing the bodies across the street, the fever arrived in Mary’s home. It took her children, one by one. She and George watched as the life was drained from them.
“I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial,” she recalled. Then her husband followed them into the grave. In the space of a few months, Mary’s family had been wiped out.
“I sat alone through nights of grief,” she went on to write. “No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the wheels of the death cart.”
Recovering from a tragedy of that magnitude would be beyond the reach of many. Mary Jones attempted to keep going by throwing herself into the task of saving those who were still alive. She obtained a permit to nurse the sufferers, and continued to do so until the plague was eventually stamped out.
Mary Jones was 30 years old when she suffered bereavement of an unimaginable magnitude. She may, at the lowest points, have wondered how her life may have turned out if her family had never left their native Cork. The family had survived through the Great Hunger that gripped Ireland, to emigrate to the new world a few years later. And this was what the New World had to offer her.
When the plague was done, she left Memphis, moving north to Chicago. What had been the defining event in her life would shape her future and propel her towards immortality. The fever had demonstrated to her that the world as it was organised ensured a divide that was stark and savage. Rights and entitlements in the America of the 19th century were the sole preserve of those with money. In time, she would do all in her power to change that, but fate’s cruel blows weren’t done with her yet.
“Mother Jones is coming back home to Cork!” reads the tagline on the website for the Mother Jones Commemorative Committee. The committee was set up two years ago to honour a favourite daughter of the city. She is of Cork, yet her exploits and achievements are little known in her native city and country. She is far better remembered in the US, where she was once dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America”. Her achievements in mobilising workers at a time when they had practically no rights is long recognised in American labour movements and beyond.
The fact that she was a woman in a man’s world merely adds to her mystique. She has entered American folklore in story and song. The poet Carl Sandburg claimed that it was Mother Jones who was being referenced in the American folk song, She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain. This, Sandburg said in The American Songbook, was referring to Jones’ appearance to boost a campaign by Appalachian mountain coal miners to form unions. A school has been established on the site where Mother Jones spent her last years, and a San Francisco investigative magazine goes by the title Mother Jones.
Just as a prophet is never recognised in his — or her — own land, so too it has taken almost 150 years for a highly significant native of Cork to receive her dues. Tomorrow, Aug 1, is the 175th anniversary of the baptism of Mary Jones, nee Harris, in the North Cathedral. On that date, a plaque in her honour will be unveiled at the Cork Sculpture Factory on John Redmond St at 7.30pm. The unveiling will form the highlight of a three-day Mother Jones festival to celebrate her life. The concerts, lectures, and screenings taking place will include a range of contributions from academics and biographers travelling from the US, where she is regarded as a pivotal force in the emerging labour movement of the late 19th century.
She was born in 1837 to Ellen Cotter and Richard Harris, who was a native of Inchigeelagh in the Lee Valley, Co Cork. She was the second oldest of four children, and her brother William later became a senior cleric in Toronto and a noted Catholic author of his day.
The Harris family survived the Great Hunger, but its patriarch had come to the conclusion that the New World was where their future lay. He set sail for Canada with his eldest son Richard in the aftermath of the Famine. When he was granted citizenship and they had saved enough money to pay for the family’s passage, all were reunited once more in Toronto.
By 1860, Mary had qualified as a teacher and had got a job in Monroe, Michigan. Although she spent some of her formative years in Canada, she would, in later years, always say that she considered herself an American. She wasn’t too enamoured with teaching, or “bossing little children” as she would later call it, and moved to Chicago to work as a dressmaker.
Her first real encounter with the world of organised labour came through her husband, George Jones. He was an iron moulder who was a member of the International Iron Molders’ Union.
The newly-married couple moved to Memphis, where their children were born in rapid succession. And then in the space of months, the fever took them all and Mary Jones was all alone in the world again.
Once the fever was beaten, she made her way back to Chicago and dressmaking. There, work provided her with the perfect distraction from the tragedy that had engulfed her life, but there was more to come. In 1871, a major fire in the city destroyed her business premises and with it the dreams she had fomented to replace the life she had lost.
The following decade of her life she laid low, most likely contemplating how one person could be burdened with so much tragedy. But she also began to become active on the ground in the labour movement, which was beginning to organise against Dickensian practices in the factories, mills, and mines of the industrialised northern states.
By the 1880s, she had thrust herself into the movement, joining a group called the Knights of Labour, which had as its focus the fight for an eight-hour day.
In 1886, she was working in Chicago when what came to be known as the Haymarket massacre occurred. A bomb was thrown during a labour meeting on May 4, killing four policemen. Three labour activists were convicted of conspiracy, and, although none of them had thrown the bomb, all were hanged. They were regarded as martyrs for the labour movement and the observance of May Day grew out of the incident.
“The Sunday following the executions, the funerals were held,” Mary wrote in her autobiography. “Thousands of workers marched behind the black hearses... These men, whatever their theories, were martyrs to the workers’ struggle. The struggle for the eight-hour day, for more human conditions and relations between man and man, lived on.”
In 1890, the mineworkers union was formed, and again Mary Jones became a union organiser. She spent the next two decades living an itinerant life, in which her “handbag served as a pillow”, following the struggle wherever it brought her.
Among the many elements of labour, it was the miners who were subjected to the harshest conditions. And so Mary Jones made it her business to represent this group more than any other, as she went from flashpoint to flashpoint across the US. Pretty quickly, she began to refer to the miners as “my boys”, and somebody began referring to her as “Mother Jones”. It was the name by which she would acquire immortality.
By 1900, she was known across the US for her long, black Victorian dresses, a bonnet, a handbag, and a tongue that could scare the daylights out of the mine bosses. She was reputed to have the power of swaying great crowds with her oratorical skills.
In 1903, she led a march from Pennsylvania to New York against child labour. The publicity from the march was regarded as a major factor in a subsequent law banning young children from mines and mills. She was regarded as a fiery orator, whose catchcry was “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”.
Then her legend took another leap in a court appearance in West Virginia, when a local attorney, Reese Blizzard, told the judge: “There stands the most dangerous woman in America. She crooks her little finger and thousands of contented men walk out on strike.”
She was jailed on that occasion, but released soon after on foot of a major protest against her incarceration.
In 1912, when she was 75, she began two years of activity in the coal wars of Colorado, in which 19 miners were killed. Again, she spent time in prison, but none of it seemed to bother her.
Later, when she was in her 80s, she was honoured in Mexico by the Pan-American labour congress for her support of the Mexican revolution.
Eventually, time caught up with her. Mother Jones spent her final years as a guest of friends from the old days, Walter and Lillie May Burgess, in rural Maryland. There, in 1930, a party was thrown in honour of her 100th birthday. She had by then added seven years to her actual age. Whether her friends and guests were aware that she was only 93 is not known, but the party was a major event, at which she received wishes from across the US. Even industrialist John D Rockefeller, a major foe of old, managed to send her his best.
Six months later, Mother Jones died peacefully. It had been some life, displaced from her native city, horribly bereaved at a young age, and then adopted as a mother of the labour movement, beloved by workers across the most industrialised nation in the world.
Last October, in the city of her birth, a group of history buffs got together and decided that it was high time to commemorate somebody who may well be the most famous forgotten woman of Cork.
“The impetus for it was the fact that she had been forgotten,” says Ger O’Mahony, one of the members of the commemorative committee.
“What we really came together to do was to bring her into the consciousness of the people of Cork and of Ireland. Whatever the politics of the day, she was an amazing woman and there should be recognition that she existed.”
Mr O’Mahony says the journey the committee has taken since its inception has been fascinating, particularly through the contacts forged with historians and academics in the US, some of whom are travelling over for the festival.
“Already, we’ve got word of the recent discovery of another song that was written about her in the States,” he says. “This one was titled Welcome Mother Jones and dates from 1902 from Iowa, where she was involved in organising miners.
“What would be great would be to get younger people interested in researching her time in Cork and maybe get recognition of her existence from official Cork. As somebody said to me the other day, she was neither saint nor scholar, and isn’t that a good thing because we have enough saints and scholars.”
* The Mother Jones Festival runs from today to Aug 2.
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