by Mark Bailey
She first came to public notice after the terrible economic depression following the Panic of 1893, when she joined forces with Coxey’s Army, named for a businessman from Ohio, Jacob Coxey, who aimed to bring thousands of unemployed men to Washington, DC, to demand a government jobs program. Mother Jones visited a platoon of Coxey’s Army near Kansas City, Missouri, raised money for them, and delivered fiery speeches, including one that encouraged the men to help themselves to food stored at a nearby army outpost. After all, she said, they had helped produce the food—it belonged to them as much as to the real soldiers for whom it was intended. One can only imagine how these militant words, coming from a little gray-haired Irishwoman who hardly looked a radical, must have lifted the spirits of these destitute men.
Mother Jones was a fervent supporter of the broader union movement and the still broader struggle of workers seeking to win a measure of dignity for themselves and ownership of the products they created, but over time she developed a special place in her heart and in her activism for mine workers and their union, the United Mine Workers. In an era when factories and slaughterhouses were virtually unregulated, at a time when workers were considered disposable commodities, few if any workers endured the conditions and dangers that mine workers experienced on a daily basis.
Every morning, often before the sun came up, they were transported into darkness, into the very bowels of the earth, where they breathed in foul gases and poisonous dust as they collected the fuel that powered the nation’s industrial might. When their workday was done, they retreated from the mine and returned to the surface, returned to homes the company owned in a town the company ran. They rarely saw the light of day. They died terrible deaths, being buried alive when things went wrong, as they often did, or wasting away before their time of lung diseases.
In the late 1890s, Mother Jones traveled primitive country roads to support striking members of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia. Although she was a woman, although she was older, and although she lived much of her life in cities, she instantly connected with the young, male, rural miners. One union official recalled that she “would take a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses. This might have been considered a little fast in ordinary women, but the miners knew and respected her.” They knew and appreciated that she had made a conscious decision to side with them, to see in their struggles a variation of her own family’s history in Ireland. She sought not to escape from her class and background but to defend it.
Mother Jones immersed herself into the work of organizing the miners and railing against the injustices of the mines and company towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and other coal-rich areas. And the men who ran the unions and worked the mines did more than simply welcome her help; they made her a leader. She was put in charge of organizing miners in parts of West Virginia in 1902 and was arrested and jailed for her activities. Her autobiography is filled with colorful anecdotes about this formative decade in her career, although it’s hard to know how many of the stories are true. But even if she exaggerated by half, her work and energy were remarkable all the same. She told of traveling to support a mine workers’ strike in Virginia and being greeted by a “terribly frightened” miner who said that her life was in danger. “The superintendent told me that if you came down here he would blow out your brains,” the miner warned. “He said he didn’t want to see you ’round these parts.”
Ah, but Mother Jones had the perfectly defiant response: “You tell the superintendent that I am not coming to see him anyway. I am coming to see the miners.”
Too melodramatic to be true? Perhaps, but there’s no question that mine owners and managers would not have wanted to see this eloquent and passionate Irishwoman anywhere near a picket line. And while they probably wouldn’t have threatened the life of a gray-haired woman, they had few qualms about brutalizing their young, male workers, or summoning state power on behalf of the company’s interests. In a dramatic turning point for the mine workers’ union, law-enforcement officers shot and killed nineteen miners during a peaceful demonstration near a mine in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, in 1897.
While women throughout the nation were stepping up their demands for a greater role in civic and public life, Mother Jones remained exceptional because of the world in which she chose to live (with and among miners), the leadership role she attained, and her unapologetic embrace of radical economic change. She was not satisfied with demanding higher wages, although she agitated for them, or a limit on the workday, although she supported such measures. She wanted to change the system top to bottom. And she recognized that oppression wore many faces—it divided not only classes but races as well. Her radicalism included challenges to white supremacy as well as to capitalist plutocracy. “The enemy seeks to conquer you by dividing your ranks, by making distinctions between North and South, between American and foreign,” she told a group of miners in Colorado in 1903. “You are all miners, fighting a common cause, a common master. . . . I know of no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there I shall go.”
As her fame spread, so did her commitments. She spoke out on behalf of Mexican revolutionaries who opposed the dictatorial regime of General Porfirio Díaz; she traveled to New York to encourage a strike by garment workers (whose plight would become a rallying cry for change when more than 140 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire in New York in 1911); and she organized a parade of children to march against the horrors of child labor.
Wherever she was, whatever the cause, Mother Jones left little doubt what she believed and how she felt about the injustices of industrial America. And she clearly relished her role as a provocateur extraordinaire. “Some people call us Bolsheviks . . . some call us Reds,” she told a labor conference in Mexico City. “Well, what of it! If we are Red, then Jefferson was Red, and a whole lot of those people that have turned the world upside down were Red.”
Her rhetoric was provocative and inspired great outrage in the press, which was probably the point. But without taking away from Jones’s steadfast principles, it is also true that she understood the theater of politics and of protest, as perhaps only she could. For she was, after all, playing a role she invented, a character who provided emotional distance from the realities of her own tragic story.
Behind the scenes, Mother Jones was not quite as incendiary. She often tried to find a middle course between more conservative union leaders and the radicals of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. As time wore on, this would become more difficult. The tensions between labor and capital seemed only to worsen, not improve, after the progressive administration of Theodore Roosevelt. In the fall of 1910, a homemade bomb planted near the Los Angeles Times building, which housed a newspaper known for its anti-union positions, killed twenty workers and injured more than one hundred. The bomb, made up of more than a dozen sticks of dynamite, was on a timer and designed to explode at four o’clock in the morning, when few people, if any, would be in the building. Instead, it went off about three hours early, when late-night workers were finishing up their shifts. Two brothers, John and James McNamara, who were active in the ironworkers’ union, were arrested for the sensational crime. James McNamara eventually pled guilty to the Times bombing, while John pled guilty to another bombing, this one at the Llewellyn Iron Works on Christmas Day, 1910. Both were sentenced to prison at San Quentin.
Mother Jones took part in a labor-backed campaign to win pardons for the two brothers, whose actions may well have reminded her of those of the secret societies her grandfather joined in early nineteenth-century Ireland. The effort on behalf of the bombers failed, and James McNamara died in prison in 1941, while his brother, who pled guilty to the less destructive ir
onworks bombing, was released and returned to organizing, dying the same year as his brother.
The Times bombing led President Woodrow Wilson to appoint a commission, headed by labor lawyer Frank Walsh, to investigate the very conditions that Mother Jones had been agitating against for decades. She traveled to New York to answer the commission’s questions, including Chairman Walsh’s formulaic question about her place of residence. She told him that she resided “wherever the workers are fighting the robbers.”
It was a very Irish moment in American labor history, as Chairman Walsh, an ardent Irish nationalist and renowned union activist, guided Mother Jones, a native of Cork, through two days of extraordinary testimony about her career as one of the nation’s most prominent voices for workers. She told of the hazards of organizing unions and strikes in the face of state and private power. She condemned the press for not reporting on industrial abuses. And she recounted her attempt to organize a march by children to the Long Island home of President Theodore Roosevelt to protest the use of child labor. The march, she said, never got close to the president’s Oyster Bay residence because of security guards. Roosevelt, she said, “had a lot of secret service men watching an old women and an army of children. You fellows do elect some wonderful presidents. The best thing you can do is to put a woman in the next time.”
The New York Times, which was not especially friendly to union organizers, described Mother Jones as “one of the most entertaining witnesses” the commission had heard. The paper noted that the commissioners had allowed her to speak virtually without interruption, so she “proceeded in her quaint way without being tied down to geography or continuity of events.”
It is hard not to notice the condescension in the Times’s description, but there was a bit of truth in what the paper said. Mother Jones certainly was entertaining, not only in front of the commission but on the picket line and on her soapbox. She understood the importance of theatrics and drama—even her physical presence was a performance, dressed as she invariably was in a flamboyant hat, and she delighted in shaking her fist at the imagined presence of bosses and capitalists.
The stories she told Walsh and his colleagues were filled with dramatic—and, as the Times suggested, mostly unverifiable—tales from the picket lines, where the workers were always heroic and the bosses always villainous. Nobody asked for details, perhaps because they understood that beneath the theatrics and the tall tales, Mother Jones truly did speak truth to power. American industrial workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had no safety net—they and their families were on their own. Meanwhile, the great industrialists of the age built fabulous fortunes, controlled politicians, manipulated supply and demand, and entertained each other with tall tales of their own, often ending with the moral that those who work hard will grow rich, while those who remained at the bottom were lazy and worthless. Many embraced social Darwinism and eugenics, which argued that success was a sign of fitness, and failure could be ascribed to genetics.
Mother Jones remained a voice for labor through the 1920s, a time associated with superficial prosperity and frivolity. She would have none of it. Despite failing health, she worked on her autobiography, visited with striking dressmakers in Chicago in 1924, and fretted over what she saw as “a peculiar apathy” among workers during the Roaring Twenties.
She picked out her final resting place—Mount Olive, Illinois, where seven mine workers and four security guards were killed during a strike in 1898.
She declared that May 1, 1930, was her one hundredth birthday. It wasn’t, but no matter—few would argue with her at that point in her life. Among those who sent good wishes was John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose anti-union sentiment was as profound as her loathing of capitalists. Somehow, the titan of corporate America and the Joan of Arc of the labor movement managed to get along, no doubt to the chagrin of their friends. “He’s a damn good sport,” Mother Jones said of Rockefeller. “I’ve licked him many times, but we’ve made peace.”
She refused to wear a corsage for the occasion, but she summoned the energy to smile and greet hundreds of admirers who had gathered for the party. On hand to record the event was the latest marvel of the age, a moving-picture camera that recorded sound. Her friends hushed as Mother Jones took a sip of water and then talked directly into that camera. “America,” she said, “was not founded on dollars but on the blood of men who gave their lives for your benefit. Power lies in the hands of labor to retain American liberty, but labor has not yet learned how to use that power.”
It was her last hurrah. She died several months later, on November 30. American workers, reeling from the effects of the stock market crash, mourned one of their greatest champions. She had been “in the forefront of labor struggles, cheering and inspiring men and women to fight for the cause of organized labor,” said William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor.
She had lived through hell on both sides of the Atlantic—from Mary Harris, child of Cork, to Mother Jones, voice of American labor. A member of an exploited class, she knew how those with power treated those without it. And as a witness to tragedy, she became even more so a participant in resistance. Mother Jones carried unexpressed sadness and loneliness wherever her activism brought her, but she refused to be defeated and would not allow those who called her “mother” to surrender to hopelessness or to resign themselves to the status quo. Rather than submit to heartbreak and tragedy, she chose to raise hell at a time when hell needed raising.
THE SOLDIER
Albert D. J. Cashier (1843–1915)
BY JILL MCDONOUGH
Private Albert D. J. Cashier was the smallest recruit in the Illinois 95th Volunteer Infantry Regiment, just nineteen when he joined the Union Army in 1862. It was August, after Shiloh, and little guys were welcome; there were plenty of boys lying about their ages and names, signing up for the cause, or to prove how tough they were, or to get the forty-dollar advance, or all of the above. The boy they called Al or Chub was only five feet tall and didn’t shave yet. He couldn’t read or write. But he had worked on a farm and as a shepherd; he was strong, and he seemed willing enough. At the end of his life he shrugged off enlisting, telling the newspapers, “They needed men and I needed excitement.”
He got it: Al served three years, leaving the army only when the war was over. Decades later, at his pension hearing, fellow soldiers remembered he was “selected whenever dependable men were absolutely needed.” They described the nearly ten thousand miles they marched, and how he good-naturedly posed for pictures with the tallest soldier in the regiment, using their contrasting five-foot and six-foot bodies to show how the pup tents were okay for Al but pretty much everybody else needed either more tent or less body. In photographs, he’s serious, gazing straight at the camera, a boyish face on a soft-looking body in a rumpled uniform.
A few of Al’s comrades also remembered a day they were outnumbered, cut off from the rest of the troops by sudden rebel gunfire. The line in front of them ran on ahead, marching double time. But they dove for cover behind some fallen trees, a lucky natural barricade. Bullets zinged around them, hitting branches, ticking into the bark. Splinters rained down while they peered out, trying to see what the enemy was up to, where they were shooting from. It was tense, and the men of the 95th were tired and hungry, frustrated and afraid, in their dirty wool uniforms. No one knew how long they’d be stuck there, how many outnumbered them, how far ahead the rest of the column was getting. Al waited for a while before he’d had enough. He scrambled up on top of the barricade and hollered, “Hey! You darn rebels, why don’t you get up where we can see you?”
His fellow soldiers loved him. He was old when he died, but his comrades still regretted his death, the year he spent in decline in the Watertown, Illinois, state mental hospital, committed there for being “loud” and “distracted.” Long after his death they were still writing to each other about Al, still putting it all together, remembering the time he climbed a tall tree to tie the Un
ion flag back onto a branch after it was shot down by rebels, remembering how he kept to himself, didn’t play poker, baseball, or dominoes like everybody else.
His commanding officer told the Omaha Bee, years later, “I left Cashier, the fearless boy of 22, at the end of the Vicksburg campaign.” The next time that officer would see him, almost five decades had passed, and Albert looked very different. It wasn’t so much the wrinkles or missing teeth, the liver spots and thinning hair, all the inescapable signs of aging. Albert was now a woman, a frail old woman of seventy.
It turned out Private Albert D. J. Cashier was born Jennie Irene Hodgers in County Louth, Ireland, in 1843.
SO. THERE’S A lot to say about that. There is naturally the how of it all: how did he manage to fool so many people for so many years? Then there is the why of it—what did he do it for? Specific to Al’s story—as opposed to our more contemporary understanding of transgenderism and cross-dressing—the circumstances here include not just what gender looked like in the nineteenth century but what the Great Hunger felt like to the Irish poor, what a new country offered up to fleeing immigrants, and what the Civil War meant to the soldiers who fought in it.
I love Jennie/Albert’s crazy, brave story. I’m Irish, and I’m a homo. Jennie Hodgers looks like every girl I wanted to sleep with in college. I can’t believe people thought she was a man: I see breasts and a woman’s face in those few surviving photos. As for the how and the why? I can only speculate, against the backdrop of a particular time and place. But I will say, for the purposes of this essay, I have chosen to refer to Albert as “he” throughout. I realize there’s a lot of thinking and conversation surrounding gender pronouns these days, but to me this seems most likely to be what Albert would have wanted. And even his Civil War comrades who fought alongside him in the early 1860s allowed him the dignity of his chosen pronoun. As one of his fellow soldiers wrote in a letter after Albert’s sex was discovered, “they found out he was a woman.”