“The Most Dangerous Woman in America”

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Driving along I-55 toward home (yes, I’m home now) today, I saw an informational sign mentioning a Mother Jones memorial at the Mount Olive, Illinois exit. As that would take me back on Route 66 for a final time this trip, I took the detour. Mary G. Harris Jones was once dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America” by a district attorney in West Virginia. To many, she probably was. Time to hop in the way-back machine. If you think 40-hour work weeks, safe working environments, and minimum ages for employment are “inalienable rights,” you’re wrong. Those laws were fought hard for…and I don’t mean by just protests. A LOT of people died in labor wars during the late 19th and early 20th century. (Harlan County, Kentucky was so deeply steeped in labor violence that it gained the unflattering nickname “Bloody Harlan.”) The worst coal mining disaster in U.S. history was the Monongah mine explosion in West Virginia in 1907. While the “official” death count is 362, most people agree it was many more…because CHILDREN were working in the coal mines alongside their fathers. If you think that’s appalling now, remember that nobody was voicing concern over it then. Until Mother Jones. An Irish immigrant who came to America after the Potato Famine, Jones lost her family (husband and four children) during a yellow fever pandemic in 1867. She had a dressmaking business and was angered by the way the workers were treated at other businesses. So she spoke up. She saw a lot of injustice at the time, and she worked to stop it. Always taking the side of the worker, she helped organize unions against harsh and dangerous working conditions. These didn’t always have pleasant outcomes (such as the Ludlow, Colorado massacre, where “company security” destroyed a union tent town by arson and gunfire, killing mostly women and children), so she organized a “children’s march” to draw attention to the fact that kids who weren’t old enough to be off of tricycles were being worked 10-12 hours a day in factories and, yes, coal mines. Eventually the laws changed, thankfully. And, these days, violence during strikes is a rarity. Those things weren’t always the case. Mother Jones asked to be buried with “her boys,” three of the eight miners who’d been killed at a coal strike in what became known as “the Battle of Virden” (Illinois). The murdered strikers had been buried in the first union-owned cemetery in the United States in Mount Olive, Illinois, a move necessitated because the cemetery owner in the town refused to have the miners entombed there for fear that their graves would become “union shrines.” When she died in 1930, her wish was granted, and she was laid to rest near three of the miners. Thinking about the dangers of a job these days is almost laughable because we have OSHA and all of these federal, state, and local regulations detailing safety rules at job sites (even something as “innocent” as an office). But it wasn’t always the case, and Mother Jones was one of the people who put herself on the front lines to fight for safety in the workplace. The photo is her grave/memorial at the Union Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois.