Quote of the Day (Unionism’s Mother Jones, Helping Mankind ‘To Break His Chains’)

“That is my mission, to do what I can to raise mankind to break his chains. The miners are close to me. The steel workers are. I go among them all. One time when I took up the Mexican question, I went to Congress to save some lives; I had never seen them in my life, but they appealed to me and said, ‘It is up to you, Mother, to save our lives.’ I went up to carry the ‘matter to Congress. It came up before the big committee….[House Committee on Rules Chair] Dalzell said to me, ‘Mother Jones, where do you live?" I said, ‘In the United States, sir.’ ‘What part of the United States?’ said he. I said, ‘Wherever the workers are fighting the robbers, there am I.’ [Loud applause.] ‘Sometimes I am in Arizona fighting the Southern Pacific blood-sucking pirates and thieves,’ said I. ‘Sometimes, I am up on the Steel Range, fighting those murderers and plunderers, sometimes I am in Pennsylvania fighting the robbers and murderers and blood-suckers there, and by the Eternal God we will clean you up and put you out of business.’"—Union organizer Mother Jones, “Speech to Striking Coal Miners,” Charleston, West Virginia, 1912, reprinted in The Radical Reader, edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian

Today’s income inequality is threatening to hark back to the Gilded Age. On this fraught Labor Day,  with employees cowed and made supine by exported jobs and imported technology, it’s worthwhile to take courage from the full-throated defiance of a white-haired woman in a bonnet of black lace who, despite barely reaching five feet tall, could command any union stage.

This woman (she didn’t take kindly to being called a “lady”—that was a term used by the Rockefellers and their kind to keep grown females complacent, she thought) was known through much of her early life as Mary Harris Jones, but by her mid-40s she had transformed herself into “Mother” Jones (1837-1930). 

For nearly 50 years, whenever workers found themselves in the thick of a fight, she could be counted on to be there. Men a foot taller and half her age took heart from her words (“Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. …Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!” she urged) and her actions (facing down cops and scabs).

The issues facing labor seem to have grown with time. But courage need not be in short supply when the example of this remarkable Irish-born woman is recalled.