Mary “Mother” Jones and the West Virginia Mine Wars

Mary "Mother" Jones at a meeting with President Calvin Coolidge, September 1924. Library of Congress.

A hard early life

Mary "Mother" Jones had a long career as a fearless union organizer among miners. She came to North America as a child, after her family fled the Irish Potato Famine in 1847.

• Loss: at 30, living in Memphis, Tennessee, she lost her husband and four children to a yellow fever epidemic.
• Fire: in 1871, after moving to Chicago to work as a seamstress, she lost her shop in the Great Chicago Fire.
• The cause: in Chicago, watching the labor uprisings of the late 1800s, she became active in workers' movements, and by the early 1900s in the struggle for miners' rights.

Organizing West Virginia

Jones began organizing miners for the United Mine Workers (UMW) in Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Impressed by how she rallied the men — and won over their wives, daughters and sisters — the UMW's president sent her to West Virginia when the union first set out to organize the state's coal miners. With her help, miners in the Kanawha Valley organized in 1902, though antiunion forces soon drove the union out.

In 1912, West Virginia miners struck again for a new union contract, and mostly succeeded. But operators at Paint Creek refused to pay their workers as much as others in the region, and hired guards from the notorious Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to harass and threaten miners and their families — threats that often turned into real violence. The Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–1913 began the West Virginia mine wars.

Jones, who had been helping miners in Colorado, came back. She met the young organizer Frank Keeney, living with his family in a strikers' tent camp at Paint Creek. When no other UMW official would organize nearby Cabin Creek, Jones went there with him. On August 4, on a makeshift platform in a ballfield near Cabin Creek, she theatrically recalled the Kanawha Valley strike ten years before, declared she was back for this fight, and called on others to join her.

Imprisoned

• Martial law: as the strike went on into the fall of 1912, Governor William Glasscock twice declared martial law in the region.
• Arrest: in February 1913, with the violence continuing, authorities arrested Jones in Charleston and moved her to a makeshift military prison in Pratt, in Kanawha County.
• Illness: the newly elected governor, Henry Hatfield — perhaps mindful of her national fame — visited Pratt and found her ill with pneumonia. He let her return to Charleston for care, but she was sent back to Pratt once she recovered.
• Sentence: a military court tried her on charges from inciting a riot to destroying property, and sentenced her to 20 years.

Mother Jones at the house in Pratt, West Virginia, where she was held, around 1913. Via Wikimedia Commons.

She was never moved to the state prison. Instead she stayed in the makeshift prison — a boarding house owned by a Mrs. Carney. From there she smuggled out a message that reached Congress: Senator John Kern of Indiana, seeking an investigation of conditions in southern West Virginia's coal fields, read it aloud in the Senate, drawing still more attention to the miners and to her imprisonment.

After 85 days, Governor Hatfield released her, pardoning her and others arrested under martial law. If he hoped the pardons would turn attention away from West Virginia, he failed: in May 1913, Kern's resolution passed, launching a congressional investigation of the conditions behind the strike.

Later years

Jones spent her remaining years supporting the labor movement and West Virginia's striking miners. But shortly before the Battle of Blair Mountain in August 1921, she opposed the miners' march on Logan County. She told miners in Mingo County the march would end in widespread bloodshed, and produced what she said was a telegram from President Warren Harding offering to end the mine owners' worst abuses if the miners went home. Strike leaders, Frank Keeney among them, doubted the telegram and marched on.

Her reputation suffered, but she stayed active. In 1925 she published an autobiography of her long fight for labor rights. Late in the decade she moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, where she died on November 30, 1930. She is still widely remembered as one of the nation's fiercest champions of labor rights.

The prison that was a landmark

The house in Pratt where she was held for 85 days was designated a National Historic Landmark in April 1992. Its owner demolished it in 1997, and the designation was withdrawn.

National Historic Landmarks are places of exceptional value in commemorating or illustrating the nation's history. Authorized by the Historic Sites Act of 1935, the Park Service's National Historic Landmarks Program oversees them, and all are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

More: Resources on the West Virginia Mine Wars.

Sources

Based on "Mother Jones," West Virginia Mine Wars series, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source gives her age as 84 in 1913 and as 100 at her death in 1930, which do not agree; this page gives neither.