by Mark Bailey
In 1853, the yellow fever epidemic took an enormous toll on the city of New Orleans. Port cities have many advantages, but they also sometimes receive unwanted cargo. This time the ship Augusta, from Jamaica, brought in mosquitoes that would change the city’s destiny. Salt marshes and drenching heat created a perfect breeding ground. Two hundred people a day were dying. Yellow jack, as it was called, took lives, while the treatments—bleeding and purging—did nothing but weaken the patients.
Margaret risked her life at the bedsides of the dying, helping when she could and taking in the orphaned children when she couldn’t. At least five nursing sisters died. Bodies were lying in the open streets. The smell of death was everywhere. One tenth of the population succumbed that season, leaving more and more children orphaned.
Margaret and her lifelong friend Sister Regis came up with a new dream out of the epidemic: to build an infant asylum. Margaret called it a “baby house.” She had already completed St. Teresa’s, as the new Sisters of Charity orphanage was named. Now she turned her energy to this new venture. She just leapt in. “Build the asylum,” she said, “and God will pay for it.”
I’m with Margaret. That’s the only way to get things done: Leap in. Believe. Because if you are all too aware of how impossible the challenge actually is, you’ll never even try. I was a kid who, from a very young age, had to run my own life. So was she. In 1862, the St. Vincent de Paul Infant Asylum would open its doors. And Margaret still wasn’t done.
A woman who clearly had a head for business, she had loaned so much money to a bakery that over time she’d become the major shareholder. When the bakery went bankrupt, Margaret was faced with the choice of losing her sizable investment or running the business herself. Once again, she just leapt in. She sold her dairy and used the money to update the baking equipment. The bakery would become known simply as Margaret’s—the first steam bakery of its kind in the country. It was an instant hit; people supported the bakery because Margaret made the best bread in New Orleans. Driven to succeed, Margaret soon realized she would have to sacrifice one of her greatest joys: living with the children.
And so it was that Margaret moved out of her room with the nuns at St. Theresa’s and moved into an apartment above Margaret’s bakery. She would rise before dawn to bake her loaves, basting them with butter in the early light. She made crackers and cakes, cookies and macaroni, her hands dusted with fine powder. The smell—it must have been its own kind of heaven.
And certainly it fell like manna to New Orleans’ poor and hungry, for Margaret never turned anyone away. She cut her loaves in half so the recipients couldn’t sell them off for liquor, but she happily fed everyone. All were served: white, black, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and soon enough blue and gray.
THERE HAD BEEN rumblings of war in New Orleans for a long time. Lincoln was elected in 1860. Louisiana seceded from the Union the next year, and shortly after, war became a reality. A port city is a valuable asset and therefore a high-value target. The Union navy blockaded the docks, and the city’s booming economy went bust.
New Orleans was not decimated, but it was occupied by a sometimes-brutal Union army. General Benjamin Butler was put in charge of the city. Butler was a former criminal lawyer who knew nothing about being a soldier. One of his first official acts was to condemn a man to death for flying a Confederate flag. The general soon became known as “Beast Butler.” After a woman spat on him in the street, he passed what was known as the Woman Order. It relegated any woman found alone on public walkways to prostitute status for the pleasure of Union soldiers. It was to this man Margaret had to appeal when the blockade threatened the supply line for her bakery. The port of New Orleans was closed, but there was flour in nearby states, and Margaret desperately needed it.
We know Margaret was of strong, broad Irish stock. She gave everything she had to others and counted herself happier for having done so. By her own grit and fierce determination, she had been able to cross the state line more or less at will. That is, until she was caught smuggling. She was brought before Beast Butler. Her friend Father Mullen came with her. Against the backdrop of the Woman Order, Margaret held firm. She had defied the rules that she thought ridiculous. In doing so she had risked rape, murder, and arrest. Now, to Beast Butler, she said,
I understand you have threatened to hang me if I continue sending food to starving people. I’ve come to tell you that I will not be stopped by your threats. I will continue until you hang me. I wonder if you feel it is Mr. Lincoln’s opinion that there is a military advantage in starving helpless people to death and am I wondering now if you have any reverence for God? If so, you will not hang me for I am needed here.
The general was reportedly amused by her courage and provided her with signed papers allowing her to travel as needed.
IN MARGARET’S LIFETIME, she donated at a minimum $600,000, the equivalent of over $16 million today. And before she was done, she opened four orphanages: St. Teresa’s Orphan Asylum on Camp Street, the Louise Home for Working Girls on Clio Street, St. Elizabeth’s House of Industry on Napoleon Street, and the St. Vincent de Paul Infant Asylum at Race and Magazine Streets. She would contribute to countless others. She had built up an empire, an orphanage empire.
As generous as she was with others, she was parsimonious with herself. She owned only two dresses: an everyday dress for the orphanage and the bakery and a black silk dress for Sundays and special occasions. She wore a Quaker bonnet, her signature. And she was, like me, plump, what we call plus-size. For some reason, I like this fact.
She devoted herself, body and soul, to her work, but although she never remarried, she did have some sort of personal life. Margaret found her two closest friends among the Sisters of Charity: Sister Regis, the Mother Superior who first hired her, and Sister Irene. Although little has been written about anything other than Margaret’s good works, her personality shows through in what sources we do have. In one instance the Daily Picayune called her “the kind, good natured dame who drives the milk cart of the Orphans’ Asylum” and reported that Margaret had quietly gone to court to speak to the magistrate on behalf of a black woman, a servant at the asylum, who had been arrested for getting drunk. With Margaret’s support the woman was let go with a warning.
In 1853 her friend Sister Irene became ill—with what, we do not know, but it was significant enough that she left the convent and resumed using her given name, Louise Catherine Jarboe. Louise became Margaret’s personal assistant, most likely managing private and business correspondence. This would have been of great value for the illiterate Margaret, who appears to have been embroiled in a handful of lawsuits stemming from her inability to understand contracts she had signed with an X.
At the age of sixty-eight Margaret suddenly fell ill. The sisters took her to their private hospital, but though Margaret spent many months there, she never recovered. Pope Pius IX sent his blessing and a crucifix. The nuns prayed at her bedside. It may have been a brain tumor, although we’ll never know for sure. She died on February 9, 1882, and the entire city went into in mourning. It was an abrupt ending to an extraordinary life. The newspapers of the day were edged in black. This illiterate Irish immigrant received a state funeral.
If you go to New Orleans today you can visit Margaret Place. The statue, now restored, sits in a small park between wide, empty streets underneath an interstate overpass. It is only the second statue in the United States to have honored a woman and the first in a public square.
It has been a while since I have visited the monument, though I have been back to New Orleans a number of times since Katrina. Still, I think about Margaret often. If you don’t see yourself reflected in history, then you can’t adequately define yourself. When, that day years ago, I first looked into Margaret’s eyes of stone—there I was. I discovered in her my archetype, my ego ideal, something, or rather someone, to stretch for, to be like. I am a mother who has adopted five children. Children born of other women, but whom I am loving and raising—w
ho are now my own. But it is a peculiar exchange, this giving, because I am getting so much back—I am saving myself. And I feel it must have been this way for Margaret. Two hundred years ago or right now, we are here to help each other along, and we do it for each other, as well as for ourselves.
I sometimes dream of Margaret, her fine-as-flour hands, her butter-basted breads, her vermillion heart with flower chambers just like mine and yours, yet larger in some admittedly mysterious way than all of ours. Margaret gives to me across the centuries, and I like to think, in this telling, that maybe I am giving a little back. So that some circle is closed, some salve applied, for the both of us—as it always is.
There at Margaret Place in New Orleans, the stone softens and a living, breathing being steps before me. I don’t believe in ghosts, but this I know: Margaret is always near.
THE ORGANIZER
Mary “Mother” Jones (1837–1930)
BY TERRY GOLWAY
Discontent in the coal mines of Colorado, fall of 1913. The miners are poorly paid and working in horrendous conditions. Immigrants, most of them, from places like Greece and Italy, they left their homes filled with visions of the great American dream. And here they are, living in squalor in the great American West, digging for riches inside the earth for the benefit of companies controlled by the Rockefeller family.
But if they believed that nobody outside of their miserable little towns knew of their plight, they were wrong. That fall, an aging Irishwoman would come to live and agitate with them, and regardless of their command of English, the miners soon would understand that here was a person with the courage to speak out. She addressed meetings and rallies in the mining towns of southeastern Colorado, urging the workers to walk off their jobs until the Rockefellers and their managers gave them what they wanted: better pay, safer working conditions, and simple dignity. Her words, delivered in the cadence of County Cork, were direct and forceful, and that they were coming from an elderly woman only added to their power.
“Don’t be afraid, boys,” she said. “Fear is the greatest curse we have. I never was anywhere yet that I feared anybody. I do what I think is right and when I die I will render an account of it. . . .You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will.”
The woman was called Mother Jones, and she stirred the miners like no other. In short order, they voted to strike and so set in motion a series of events leading to the infamous Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, when National Guard troops and security guards opened fire on a mine encampment, killing some two dozen, with women and children among the dead.
Ludlow was a turning point for the U.S. labor movement, and it placed a nearly eighty-year-old Irish immigrant at the center of the nation’s suddenly urgent conversation about the lives of those who worked in dark, dangerous mines, who trudged dreary factory floors, who picked vegetables and fruit in the searing heat, all for the benefit of gigantic corporations controlled by families who possessed riches beyond description.
Mary “Mother” Jones became the voice of American labor in the early twentieth century by transforming her own life, her own immigrant story, and, perhaps, if subconsciously, her own personal tragedies into a passionate campaign for justice and democracy during a dangerous time in American history. She was unafraid to enrage her foes with incendiary language—“I’m a Bolshevist from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head,” she would say in late 1919, as Attorney General Mitchell Palmer scoured the countryside in search of Communists. Around the same time, she told striking steelworkers in Indiana how they ought to deal with scabs: “I’ll be ninety years old the first of May, but by God if I have to, I’ll take ninety guns and shoot the hell out of them.”
Her unapologetic hell-raising and core beliefs reflected the injustice she saw in the streets, tenements, factories, and mines of America. But to hear her tell it, the passion she brought to the picket line could be traced not to her own hard luck but to her family’s experience in Ireland. As she later told a congressional committee, “I belong to a class which has been robbed, exploited, and plundered through many long centuries. And because I belong to that class, I have an impulse to go and help break the chains.”
Not all immigrants, from Ireland or from elsewhere for that matter, took such a path. A penniless Andrew Carnegie arrived in the United States from Scotland in 1848 and chose to identify not with the poor in his adopted country but with the industrialists. Carnegie did not break chains; his companies imposed them—he himself literally wrote the book on the “Gospel of Wealth.” And although the vast bulk of immigrants obviously did not become fabulously wealthy, many aspired to create their own immigrant success story, identifying more with the perceived champions of the Gilded Age than its victims. Here was a place where the penniless could become rich, a place where the heroes of Horatio Alger’s yarns pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and lived happily ever after.
But Mother Jones was different. She saw the creators of the industrial age in much the same way as her Irish ancestors saw their British overlords. They were not figures to be emulated but the enforcers of an oppressive and inequitable system. She saw opportunities in her new country, all right—the opportunity to create a fairer, more democratic society, a place where lives could be improved not through riches but through justice. That was her American dream.
And so by the early twentieth century, she became a familiar presence on picket lines, at union rallies, and at government inquiries. Workers, journalists, public officials, and even the occasional capitalist—like John D. Rockefeller Jr., with whom, oddly, she was quite friendly—called her Mother and thought they knew her. And in a way they did. They knew a person named Mother Jones, a name she adopted for herself as her fame grew. She was, in fact, not the first labor agitator to adopt the name—an English immigrant in Indiana, married to a coal miner, served as editor of a journal for railroad workers in the 1880s and signed her poetry and writing Mother Jones. But that other Mother Jones’s fame was short-lived, and she stopped writing by 1889. Soon after that, Mary Jones began referring to herself as Mother Jones. Did she know about the poet and coal miner’s wife from Indiana? Maybe. More important, though, she saw something in this name—recycled, perhaps, but new for her—that represented the person she had become.
MOTHER JONES WAS born Mary Harris in Cork, most likely in 1837. Some historians have argued that she was born several years later, but historian Elliott J. Gorn seems to have settled the debate, noting that she was baptized in St. Mary’s Cathedral on August 1, 1837. “I was born in revolution,” Mary later wrote. And indeed, there had been a political revolution that shook the British ruling establishment to its core in the years just before her birth. In 1828, a middle-class barrister from County Clare named Daniel O’Connell became the first Catholic elected to the House of Commons since Britain had imposed a religious test for elected officials in the late 1600s, a test that effectively barred Catholics from power. When O’Connell took his seat in the Commons, after years of peaceful agitation and political organizing among Ireland’s poor, authorities in London predicted civil war. After all, was not the British ruling structure built on the ideology of Protestant supremacy?
No such strife broke out, at least not on the scale authorities feared. But in places like Cork, landless peasants banded together in secret societies to carry out limited, though often brutal, acts of violence against the propertied class. Some accounts describe the rural violence of the early nineteenth century as defensive and conservative, a reaction to enclosure movements, falling prices, and other developments that did nothing to lift the burdens of poor tenant farmers. Other accounts portray the secret societies, with names like Rockites, Terry Alts, Threshers, and Whiteboys, as virtual guerrilla armies seeking to exact revenge against landlords and their agents, who, in their view, had stolen the soil of Ireland from its native Gaelic inhabitants.
O’Connell was the uncrowne
d king of Ireland when Mary Harris was born, and he and his allies used their considerable leverage to negotiate for reform in Ireland. But some in Ireland, like members of the Harris family, were not content with the actions of middle-class reformers or the political jockeying in the Palace of Westminster. They lived on the brink, subject to the whims of landlords, nature, and free-market dogma. And they fought back against those forces with clandestine, late-night raids against livestock, property, and, sometimes, those who represented the landlord class.
Mary’s grandfather was among those who joined in the struggle. There is no indication that, aside from their poverty, he had experienced a tenant farmer’s worst nightmare—abrupt eviction. But others did, and once thrown off the land they tilled but did not own, they were homeless and hungry, with few alternatives save emigration. Grandfather Harris often slipped away at night to join other landless farmers as they sought to instill fear in those whom they believed were terrorizing them with uncertainty and injustice.
He was arrested and hanged when Mary was about two years old.
According to one of Mary’s biographers, her father, Richard Harris, also became involved in secret society violence and was a wanted man. In this account, which has more than a dash of melodrama, soldiers came to the Harris cottage and searched the house for Richard, even checking the chimney, while little Mary and her mother looked on. But Richard was gone. He left abruptly and was on his way across the Atlantic. Soon, he had told his family, he would send for them, and they would be together again.
In her autobiography, written 1925, Mother Jones devoted four sentences—the first four—to the Irish childhood of her former self. Biographers and historians have pieced together other details about her life from various sources, but there is a great deal we do not know. It is safe to say, however, that the trauma of her early childhood—her grandfather hanged, her father forced to flee, the spectacle of soldiers in her house, looking for her father—influenced how she thought about resistance and power. Mary witnessed firsthand the kind of power the state can bring to bear against those who threaten it. She saw in Ireland what happens to rebels and revolutionaries more often than not.
