Series 7 - Mary Harris Jones ('Mother Jones') autobiography

330pp

Materials relating to The Autobiography of Mother Jones by famed American labour activist Mary Harris Jones, known popularly as Mother Jones. The autobiography was originally published in 1925 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company) and republished in 1972 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company/Illinois Labor History Society) and 2004 (Mineola, New York: Dover).
Per Kerby A. Miller: 'Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones, b. ca. 1837 in Cork city, where her Catholic family apparently were Famine refugees from the countryside, before chain-migrating to Canada and the US, probably beginning with her father, an illiterate laborer, in 1847. Mother Jones died in 1930 at age 100 by her own reckoning or in her early or mid-90s. Perhaps as a result, her memoir contains some minor autobiographical and historical inaccuracies, but these have been addressed by several labor historians, including her most recent biographer, Elliott Gorn. Mother Jones's memoir is scanty on personal details; even her first chapter, on her Irish background and the deaths of her husband and children in Memphis, during the yellow-fever epidemic of 1867, is very brief and provides few details. She never states clearly how and why she transformed herself, subsequently, into a legendary labor organizer and agitator, although answering that question is one of Gorn's major concerns. Nonetheless, her memoir is a powerful and dramatic description of her role in helping to combat the most tyrannical and brutal aspects of capitalist exploitation during the decades of industrialization and corporate ascendancy in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Her descriptions of the working and living conditions for coal miners, textile workers, child laborers, and their wives and mothers, are detailed and harrowing. Read closely, it can be seen that Jones makes a number of references to Irish workers and their families. Also, she often draws analogies between workers' oppression by armed forces in the US and Irish oppression by the Constabulary in Ireland itself. Sometimes, the "Irishness" of her story comes out in her own dialect and in those with whom she's speaking. She also mentions many historically important US labor leaders who were of Irish birth (Haggarty, Fitzpatrick) or of Irish parentage (Mitchell, Foster). Although she counselled non-violence, her anger at exploitation, injustice, and repression is deep and clear. Although idiosyncratic, she was a strong socialist and (unlike the vast majority of labor spokespersons) she had the courage to support both the Mexican and the Bolshevik revolutions. Unfortunately, her memoir does not mention the 1916 Rising or the Irish Revolution of 1919-21, although, according to Gorn, she frequently attributed her own radical sympathies to her family's Irish heritage. In that sense, her self-portrait is much more "Irish" than that of Frank Roney, who claimed to have abandoned "Irishness" class struggle.'
The series consists of: a bound copy of the 2004 reprint of the autobiography; Kerby A. Miller's notes and thoughts on Mother Jones; a printout of the Wikipedia entry on Jones retrieved 22 April 2018; Miller's transcript of the original 1926 autobiography; and a photocopy of the 1972 reprint.