Nine Irish Lives

by Mark Bailey

  But despite the value of these early lessons, Mother Jones was always reticent to reflect on her formative years and that distant person named Mary Harris. Rather, as historian Gorn has pointed out, she seemed far more intent on focusing on the character she had created.

  She insisted, for example, that she was born in 1830—and, a century later, her friends and allies celebrated her hundredth birthday with a five-layer cake. An early newsreel camera was on hand to record the images and capture her voice. Workers should “stick together and be loyal to each other,” she said, before cutting her enormous birthday cake.

  But that wasn’t so much Mary Harris speaking as Mother Jones, the wonderful character that Mary had created years earlier. Not a hundred years old, she was in her early nineties. She insisted that her father left Ireland in 1835, a decade before the famine, and that he sent for his family “as soon as he became an American citizen.” But most historians believe she actually left a bit later—after the potatoes turned black and failed, and failed again, year after year.

  Growing up in the city, rather than in the countryside, Mary may not have seen the rotting fields or heard the moans and weeping from rural cottages. But all of that took place not far from her home. Famine Ireland was a dreadful place. Eyewitnesses wrote of corpses lying in fields and along roadways, of rats gnawing on the remains of children, of hollow-eyed men, women, and children in the final stages of fever and disease. The British administrator who presided over relief efforts, Charles Trevelyan, complained that the “great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people.” Indeed, Ireland actually had no shortage of food, but as the immigrant Roman Catholic bishop of New York, John Hughes, noted, the poor simply could not “pay for the harvest of their own labor.” Crops were exported while the Irish starved to death because political and economic dogma insisted that the government ought not to interfere with the marketplace.

  The potato would return to health in 1852. But by then, so many were gone from places like Cork and the western province of Connaught, where the Irish language and Gaelic customs and traditions had been so strong. A million people were dead. Another two million had emigrated to somewhere else. The population of Ireland had been eight million in 1840, five years before the hunger began. It was five million in 1880. The famine had changed Ireland—and the United States—utterly.

  How did it change Mary Harris and her family? Mary is silent on the topic. It is a puzzling silence. Perhaps it’s no wonder so many have accepted the narrative that she created, concluding that she must have left before the hunger and the dying began. Why else would she say nothing about it?

  Perhaps she simply chose not to remember; perhaps she felt guilty, having fled her home as others starved. But as Mary transformed herself into Mother Jones, she pushed aside her childhood memories of hunger and death, as others did too. For silence followed the famine wherever the starving survivors settled, so much so that its centennial in the late 1940s and early 1950s passed almost without notice on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish American children two generations removed from the experience knew little or nothing about what it was like to see neighbors, friends, loved ones reduced to starvation. Had they asked, they likely would have been told that it is better not to speak of such things. Certainly Mother Jones did not.

  Historians believe that the Harris family had to separate, in about 1847, when Mary was ten. Her father and her twelve-year-old brother left Ireland for work in North America. It seems likely that she and her other siblings and their mother followed about five years later. We know nothing of what she saw or how she felt as she left behind her native land, nothing about the journey across the Atlantic. Most likely it was uncomfortable at best, terrifying at worst. The emigrant ships were packed with the starving and the sick in appalling conditions. One passenger described the sight of hundreds of people “huddled together without light, without air” below decks, “wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart.” Many did not survive, dying of starvation or disease en route or drowning when rickety, unseaworthy ships sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  The Harris family was reunited in the New World, not in the United States but in Toronto, where her father had found work after first living in Vermont. There the family began to build a new life three thousand miles from the land they thought of as home. It was, and remains, no easy task, but at least they had the comfort of each other.

  Mary attended school in Toronto, learned the art of dressmaking, and was considered promising enough to earn a recommendation from a priest for admission to a normal school, a type of college that specialized in the training of teachers. While it seems she attended only the first year of a two-year program, she considered herself qualified to teach, having had a good deal more education than most people in either Canada or the United States. But she faced an obstacle: it was hard, if not impossible, for Catholics to obtain teaching jobs in Toronto’s public schools. Things were little better in America at the time: in many cities with large Irish Catholic populations, a nativist movement supported overtly anti-Catholic curricula in public schools, leading to the expansion of a separate Catholic school system.

  Still, Mary left Canada for the United States in search of a teaching position. It is not clear whether she ever saw or spoke with her parents and siblings again. Like her memories of Ireland, her family is mentioned only in the first paragraph of her autobiography.

  She found a teaching job eventually, but perhaps that second year in normal school would have served her, because she quickly learned that teaching was not what she hoped it would be. She moved to Chicago and opened a dressmaking shop. “I preferred sewing to bossing little children,” she wrote.

  Her skepticism of bosses, authority figures—even of herself as an authority figure—was understandable. Authority figures in her native country were the very people against whom her father and grandfather rebelled. They were the people who enforced a skewed system of justice. They were not empowered to protect the likes of her or her family. Their job was to keep people like her in their place.

  Nevertheless, she found herself back in the classroom, back to bossing little children, when she moved down to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1860, just as her adopted country was being torn apart. There, for what might have been the first time, she found happiness. George Jones was his name, an iron molder active in the National Union of Iron Molders. The two met in the fall and married soon thereafter, as Southern states, including Tennessee, came to terms with the election of Abraham Lincoln. Tennessee became the eleventh and last state to secede from the Union, in June 1861, about two months after South Carolina forces fired on Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the Civil War. Mary Harris Jones, who left privation and rural violence in Ireland, now found herself living in a strategically important city in what was to become the nineteenth century’s bloodiest conflict, a war in which her neighbors and fellow Tennessee residents fought to preserve their ability to own and sell human beings.

  Precisely how Mary reconciled herself to living in a Confederate state, in a nation whose founding principles supported the degradation of men, women, and children with black skin, is another mystery. To be sure, she had little time for reflection, for she became, in short order, the mother of three small children all under the age of five. The woman who had no taste for “bossing little children” found herself doing precisely that, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The war in Memphis was blessedly short, but the city was not immune to the tensions that accompanied peace and the beginning of a new era in U.S. history. Black people, now free from the shackles of the slave owner, left the countryside in search of work, as so many white people had been doing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But white residents, including Irish members of the city’s police department, were not prepared to surrender the privileges of
white supremacy. Nearly fifty blacks were murdered and dozens of homes burned during a three-day race riot in the city from May 1 to May 3, 1866. The violence ended only when federal troops arrived to restore order.

  Through all of this, Mary tended to the needs of her growing family while her husband labored at the foundry and devoted some of his spare time to his union. Iron molders like George Harris were in demand, and he and his fellow workers used their leverage to increase union membership throughout the region and the nation itself. The iron molders’ chief organizer, William Sylvis, declared that “all wealth and all power centers in the hands of the few, and the many are their victims and their bondsmen.”

  She gave birth to her fourth child, Mary, in 1867. But in late summer of that same year, reports of a yellow fever epidemic in the Deep South began to trickle into Memphis. The disease was a frightening killer of people who lived in close quarters in humid locales (its association with mosquitoes was unknown at the time). The disease struck Memphis in mid-September, and before long, the epidemic crossed the threshold of the Jones home, sickening the children. One by one they showed the symptoms: aches, intestinal pain, vomiting. One by one they died, all of them—Catherine, the eldest, born in 1862; Elizabeth, born in 1863; Terence, born in 1865; and baby Mary, just a few months old. And then the disease carried away George. His union brothers raised money to bury him.

  Mary was quite suddenly alone again and in every way imaginable. No one dared even venture into her home to comfort her for fear of contracting the disease. She lay awake at night, listening to the sounds of carts as they moved through the stricken streets, collecting the bodies of the dead. After a while, she received permission from the city to tend to the sick and dying, putting her own health and life in jeopardy to try to save or at least comfort others.

  But she could not remain in Memphis, not after this. Memphis held the graves of her children and her husband and her memories. She had to move away and move on.

  She went back to Chicago, where she had lived briefly before the Civil War, and returned to running a dressmaking business with a partner she chose not to identify in her autobiography. Her description of this time in her life is almost as sparse as that of her childhood, and with good reason. Her children and her husband were dead and buried, but the memories of their suffering were fresh. She very likely was in a daze. If she chose not to dwell on this pain, she could hardly be blamed.

  In these bitter years following her heartbreak, Mary developed a keen awareness of the injustices of the fledging Gilded Age. She sewed dresses for the wealthy, who lived in splendor on Lake Shore Drive along Lake Michigan, but often found herself looking out from her shop and seeing “the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front” in the winter or sleeping in parks to escape the heat of their tenement apartments in the summer.

  On the night of October 8, 1871, a small fire broke out near the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary on DeKoven Street (named for the founder of the banking giant Northern Trust Company). The neighborhood’s wooden cottages were quickly turned to cinders, and within hours, the entire city seemed to be in flames. The great Chicago fire left one hundred thousand people homeless and destroyed nearly 17,500 buildings. One of them was Mary’s dress shop. She lost everything she had. She joined thousands of other residents on the lakefront, watching the city burn, watching her life take another tragic turn.

  Decades later, Mother Jones would write that her devotion to the cause of labor and workers’ rights rose from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire. But her sense of empathy and capacity for outrage already had been formed by all that she had seen and experienced, both in Ireland and in the United States. If anything, the fire in Chicago brought to an end her time of grieving and reflection after the trauma of Memphis. Her days on the sidelines were over.

  But her transformation was not entirely complete. She still was Mary Harris Jones, Irish immigrant, widow, childless mother. She had not yet reinvented herself into the character that would make her famous.

  How and where she spent the years immediately following the Chicago fire is another mystery. Many accounts have Mary on the barricades as early as 1877, when one hundred thousand rail workers went on strike to protest their second pay cut in a year. She said her friends in the labor movement asked her to stand with them in Pittsburgh, where workers were demonstrating against the Pennsylvania Railroad. The state militia was called in, shots were fired, and nearly two dozen people were killed.

  But again her most careful biographer, Elliott J. Gorn, makes a persuasive argument that this account is very likely not true, that it was another instance of Mother Jones creating a narrative for her character. She was not well known in 1877 and certainly was not as active in the union movement as she would later be. But she was living in Chicago, in the right place to observe the inequities of the age with the eyes of the newcomer, the immigrant, and the natural-born skeptic. While so many others dreamed of trading their rags for riches—the great American saga—she would seek to create a system in which fewer wore rags, because riches were more justly distributed.

  Chicago was the home of men who were making great fortunes—Marshall Field, founder of the department store chain; Cyrus McCormick, founder of the company that became International Harvester; and George Pullman, who invented the sleeper railroad car. Along Lake Michigan’s shoreline, the wealthy built replicas of European villas where they entertained each other in grand style while sharing their anxieties about the dangerous ideas circulating among the city’s workers and jobless—the desperately poor families who sent their children into the factories so as to keep a leaky roof over their heads and stale bread on their table.

  The city was restive and tense, alive with ideas that ran counter to the transatlantic dogma of free and unregulated markets and the unfettered pursuit of private profit. Mary may not have been a part of this conversation, at least not yet, but she surely was an eager listener. Almost fifty, she joined the nation’s dominant labor union, the Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, after it began admitting women. The union’s leader (with the title of “grand master workman”) was Terence V. Powderly, the son of Irish immigrants, mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a member of the secretive Irish nationalist organization Clan na Gael. She and Powderly became friends and allies; in fact, the bond between them was so strong that Mary addressed Powderly as “my own dear son” in a letter in the early twentieth century. Powderly’s involvement in Clan na Gael, a group that did not flinch from supporting violent revolution in Ireland, faded over time as he devoted most of his energy to improving the plight of American workers—regardless of their hyphen. Irish immigrants like the famous Fenian agitator Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who saw his father die of starvation in Cork, raised money to send men with dynamite to blow up targets in London in the 1880s. But Mary, like Powderly, was more intent on winning justice for American workers than she was on winning freedom for her native land.

  The Knights were the most formidable challenge to capital in the 1880s. They were a million strong, they admitted women and African Americans as equals, and they recruited skilled and nonskilled workers alike. The Knights and Powderly played a key role in providing support, education, and a platform for Mary’s final transformation into Mother Jones.

  While so much of Mother Jones’s youth and early middle age is shrouded in mystery and half-truths, there is little question that May 4, 1886, truly was a pivotal date for her. It might be said that it was the day her new persona became complete. On that day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, somebody threw an improvised bomb loaded with dynamite at police officers as they were about to break up a pro-labor demonstration. Seven officers died. Shots then rang out, and civilians fell, although the precise number of civilian deaths remains uncertain. The deadly violence came three days after May Day, when workers in Chicago and across the country had gone on strike, demanding an eight-hour workday.

  The city reacted as though a revo
lution were imminent. Radicals, or people thought to be radicals, were rounded up. The press stoked fears that Chicago would soon fall into the hands of anarchists. Eight activists were arrested and convicted in short order, and four were hanged six months later. Another committed suicide before he could be brought to the gallows. The others received life sentences. Business exploited fears by lashing back at unions, and membership in the Knights of Labor began to fall precipitously, from a million to about a hundred thousand in just three years.

  While Mary said she did not agree with the anarchists, she had attended meetings they organized and listened “to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the workers.” The Haymarket violence did not turn her into an agitator overnight. That part of her life was still to come. What it did do was remind Mary that the goals she sought—justice and equality—required disruption, and disruption could and often did lead to violence. It happened in the darkened fields of County Cork. It happened in the streets of Chicago. It seemed, at times, inevitable—and yet was it necessarily so? Could it be avoided? This was an issue she seemed to struggle with during her many decades of hell-raising.

  No longer young, indeed, verging on elderly, Mother Jones began her public career in the mining regions of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the 1890s, delivering speeches of encouragement to strikers. If she was, in fact, born in 1837, she would have turned sixty during the last decade of the nineteenth century. But her new cause and her new life seemed to invigorate rather than exhaust her.