Blackwell Reference Online

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Mother Jones was one of the most famous women in America during the early years of the twentieth century, although by the early twenty-first century she is nearly forgotten. “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living,” she used to tell her audiences, and her fiery words inspired thousands of men and women to join unions and the Socialist Party. Her friend Upton Sinclair described her in a lightly fictionalized account about the struggle to organize the Colorado coalfields in 1913: There broke out a storm of applause which swelled into a tumult as a little woman came forward on the platform. She was wrinkled and old, dressed in black, looking like somebody's grandmother; she was in truth the grandmother of hundreds of thousands of miners … Hearing her speak, you discovered the secret of her influence over these polyglot hordes. She had force, she had wit, above all she had the fire of indignation – she was the walking wrath of God. … Asked for where she lived while testifying before a congressional committee, she declared “my address is like my shoes, it follows me wherever I go.” ( Sinclair 1976 : 88–90) And it was literally true; for 25 years, in her sixties, seventies, and into her eighties, Mother Jones traveled all over the United States, organizing workers and a range of trades and beating the drum for the socialists. Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in Cork, ... log in or subscribe to read full text