Mother Jones: The "Most Dangerous Woman in America" at 83

In her eighty-third year, by the birthday she had given herself. That was Mary Harris Jones in February 1913, under arrest in Charleston, West Virginia, headed for a military court that would sentence her to twenty years in the state penitentiary for conspiracy to murder. She had already survived a yellow fever epidemic that killed her husband and all four of her children inside a week, watched a fire burn down the shop she had rebuilt her life around, and spent four decades talking coal miners into striking against some of the richest companies in the country. A federal prosecutor had handed her a label a decade earlier that she never bothered to correct: the most dangerous woman in America.

The birthday she picked herself

She was baptized Mary G. Harris on August 1, 1837, at the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Anne in Cork, Ireland, daughter of Richard and Ellen Harris. The Famine years pushed her family across the Atlantic in stages, her father and brother first, her mother and the rest of the children a few years later, all of them eventually settling in Toronto.

None of that made it into her own account of her life. In the autobiography she published in 1925, she gave her birth date as May 1, 1830, a date that put her on the calendar next to the day organized labor around the world celebrates as May Day. She kept the story to the end: on May 1, 1930, well-wishers and reporters marked what she called her hundredth birthday. Historians only confirmed the earlier date using the Cork parish register decades after her death. Whatever her reasons, the seven-year gap is the kind of detail this record keeps rather than smooths over.

What she lost in Memphis and Chicago

Mary Harris moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and in 1861 married George E. Jones, an iron molder and member of the Iron Molders’ Union. Six years later, a yellow fever epidemic swept the city. Her own account of it:

One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught the fever and died.

She moved to Chicago afterward, built a dressmaking business sewing for the city’s wealthier families, and lost that too: “In October, 1871, the great Chicago fire burned up our establishment and everything that we had,” she wrote. Afterward she started attending Knights of Labor meetings at a hall near the ruins.

Becoming Mother Jones

By the mid-1890s she was a paid organizer for the newly formed United Mine Workers of America, sent into coalfields from Pennsylvania to Colorado to sign up miners local by local. Miners’ families started calling her Mother, and the name outlasted every other one she carried; the nickname that came with it, the Miners’ Angel, said what the rank and file thought she was worth. In June 1905 she was named among the contributors to the Chicago convention that founded the Industrial Workers of the World, alongside Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood, one of the only women in a hall organizing what its founders called One Big Union. The union work is what she meant when someone once asked where she lived and she said, “Well, wherever there is a fight.”

The most dangerous woman in the country

Her organizing style came with an edge the pamphlets didn’t carry. In one West Virginia coal town during a UMW campaign, she found striking miners paying to hold their meetings in a church, told them a union was a fighting institution rather than a praying one, moved the meeting to the schoolhouse, and gave them the line labor has repeated ever since:

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living

The campaign that line came out of got her arrested. On June 21, 1902, deputy marshals took her into custody at Clarksburg, West Virginia for defying a federal injunction against holding union meetings, part of a wider UMW drive in the state’s Fairmont coalfield. At her trial that summer in the federal court at Parkersburg, before Judge John Jay Jackson Jr., the prosecutor offered the judge a deal: go easy on her, but only if she agreed to leave the state for good. Her own account of how he made the case for why she needed watching:

Your honor - there is the most dangerous woman in the Country today.

Later accounts name that prosecutor as Reese Blizzard and give the line a longer, more theatrical shape: she comes into a state, crooks her finger, and twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out. That’s the version that gave a later biography its title and made “the most dangerous woman in America” stick as a permanent label. It isn’t the version in her own book. Whichever words the prosecutor actually used, the case is forgotten and the label is on shirts. She kept organizing for another three decades and never once denied it fit.

Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, and a twenty-year sentence

Paint Creek’s miners struck in April 1912 over a wage gap of two and a half cents a ton with other union mines nearby. Jones arrived that June to organize, and by July she was warning West Virginia’s governor, William E. Glasscock, in front of a crowd of miners in Charleston:

I warn this little governor that unless he rids Paint Creek of these mineguard thugs, there is going to be one hell of a lot of bloodletting in these hills.

Glasscock declared martial law on September 2 and sent in twelve hundred state troops. Martial law didn’t stop the violence: in February 1913, gunmen firing from an armored train nicknamed the Bull Moose Special raked a miners’ tent colony at Holly Grove, killing a striker. Within days, deputies arrested Jones in Charleston and moved her under guard to a makeshift military prison at Pratt, where a court tried her, along with dozens of others, on charges that ran up to conspiracy to murder. She refused to recognize the court’s authority to try a civilian at all. It convicted her anyway:

I was tried for murder. Along with the others I was sentenced to serve twenty years in the state penitentiary.

She was in her eighty-third year, by the birthday she had given herself.

She didn’t serve it. Word of her sentence reached Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, who read her smuggled telegram into the Congressional Record and used it to push through a resolution sending the Senate Committee on Education and Labor to investigate West Virginia’s coalfields. The state’s new governor, Henry Hatfield, would not let the military court’s sentence stand: he set the convictions aside and released Jones along with most of the other prisoners. She had served roughly eighty-five days.

Colorado and the last strike

Within months she was in Colorado, working the United Mine Workers’ strike against John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, underway since September 1913. State authorities twice ordered her out of the strike zone and jailed her for coming back. She was away from southern Colorado when National Guardsmen and company gunmen burned the tent colony at Ludlow on April 20, 1914.

The number she never let go of

She kept working well past the age most people would stop, whichever of her two birth years you use. At a dinner of five hundred women, most of them suffrage supporters, one asked how they were supposed to stand up for free speech in the streets without a vote. Her answer became the title of an autobiography chapter:

I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country You don’t need a vote to raise hell You need convictions and a voice

On May 1, 1930, well-wishers and reporters marked the hundredth birthday she had given herself. She died seven months later, on November 30, 1930, at a friend’s home near Silver Spring, Maryland. Union members carried her back to Illinois, to Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, and buried her beside men killed in an 1898 strike battle at Virden. The parish register in Cork puts her actual age that day at ninety-three.

Nobody has ever disputed the twenty-year sentence, the yellow fever house in Memphis, or the fire that took her dress shop. Only the number she picked for herself needed correcting.