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Page 166

 		 Page 166 - Mother Jones for the Miners

The reading selection

   Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was one of the most interesting and inspiring characters of her era.  An Irish immigrant by way of Canada, she lost her husband and children in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1857.
 
   Jones took up the cause of workers in the 1870s.  Miners and child labor became the focus of her work after 1880.  She continued the fight for fair treatment in the workplace right up to her death in 1930.  She called the miners "my boys."  They called her Mother Jones.  When she died, an estimated 50,000 people attended her funeral.
 
  She embraced the ideas of socialism for a time, and was considered quite radical by some.  Her fight, however, was not motivated so much by abstract political ideology as by a vigorous moral outrage at the injustices she saw around her.
 
   The selection in the workbook is from her autobiography.  It gives a good sense of the energy and creativity she brought to every labor dispute she was involved in.


The picture

   Mother Jones was the affectionate name miners gave Mary Harris Jones.  She remained active in the fight for miners rights, and against child labor, well into old age.
 

Group discussion question

   Mother Jones says that the political system was not functioning as a democracy in Colorado, but instead, was in the hands of mining companies.  She says that the governor, the courts, and the legislature were all influenced or controlled by the mine owners.
 
   One of her best lines, probably only slightly exaggerated, says that if the mine owners told the governor to bark, "he yelped for them like a mad hound."
   The result, she says, was that the people of Colorado could not get a law passed for an eight hour work day.  Miners realized that winning protection from unfair labor practices would take a coordinated strike by all the metal (iron, copper, etc.) miners.  They also hoped the coal miners would join the strike.

   On her trip through the mining camps, Mother Jones saw conditions that she says were deplorable and amounted almost to slavery. 
   She says mine owners used a number of tactics to keep an unfair advantage over the workers.  For example, the mining companies typically owned the miners' houses.  The result was that workers feared being thrown out if they complained about work conditions. 
   Often the men were paid in scrip (paper certificates with a dollar value printed on them) rather than real money.  That made it hard for a worker to leave the mine, since it was hard to accumulate savings in real money.







Copyright Notice

   Copyright 2018 by David Burns.  All rights reserved.  Illustrations and reading selections appearing in this work are taken from sources in the public domain and from private collections used by permission.  Sources include: the Dover Pictorial Archive, the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The Hart Publishing Co., Corel Corporation and its licensors, Nova Development Corporation and its licensors, and others.  Maps were created or adapted by the author using reference maps from the United States Geological Survey and Cartesia Software.  Please see the home page for this title for more information.