Mary stated in her autobiography that she became very interested in the trade union ideals of her husband. Her personal experiences had obviously encouraged her to learn about radical ideas which were developing from the influx of European immigrants who were working side by side in railroads, mills and factories.

She appears to have read widely, attended radical meetings, listened to speakers and quickly realised that those with power and money do not easily hand over control of society to others.

She has mentioned books by Wendell Philipps, Tolstoy, Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Paine among her reading materials. Later on, she always insisted that labour activists and workers should educate themselves and stated that for the working class, education was the key to their emancipation.

3.1 Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labour.

Due to the union connections of George Jones, she joined the Knights of Labour in the early 1880s. It is likely that she was involved with various attempts to establish unions during the 1870s and although she says she attended meetings of the Knights, listening to their splendid speakers, this may have been so, but women were only admitted to full membership in 1881.

The Knights of Labour were then headed by Terence Powderly of Scranton, Pennsylvania, an Irish Catholic, whose family roots are in County Meath in Ireland, and with whom she had a lifelong friendship. Powderly, although a moderate in labour matters and who believed more in education than strikes as a source of change, managed to ensure that the Knights became the first nationwide organisation of labour.

He was a versatile operator and was quietly active in Clan na Gael, the Irish Nationalist organisation which was closely connected to the Fenians and retained a high degree of secrecy over its affairs. Powderly served on the Central Council of the Land League in America, and later in 1881 was appointed its Vice-President.

Many Irish labour activists in the Knights of Labor such as Myles McPadden and John J. Mahoney supported the use of the boycott in the fight against “landlordism” in Ireland, but the organisation was split on applying similar boycott tactics to employers by the American labour movement in its actions during strikes.    

The Land League in Ireland was led by Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. They demanded ‘the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland.’ The campaign in Ireland was eventually successful and the contribution of the Irish in America was vital, assisted as it was by the active fundraising and practical support of the American Land League and many in the Knights of Labor.

In her autobiography, she rarely mentions Ireland in the records of her speeches and writings which remain available, however, Mother Jones was sufficiently aware of Irish history to allude to the fact that “the Irish Fenians carried on their fight for Irish liberty here in America, money was raised in America to aid Parnell, the Irish patriot.” (P142) This comment was in the context of the Mexican revolutionaries in America not being allowed to raise money in America.

Albert Parsons, wrongly hanged for the Haymarket Affair, in a letter to the Chicago Times dated July 26th 1886 denounced Powderly, calling his act doubly despicable for the latter’s attempts to distance the Knights from the campaign to secure the release of the Haymarket defendants.      

Philip J Foner in his 1983 publication, Mother Jones Speaks considered Powderly “an inconsistent and troubled leader” as the Knights of Labour had become too complex an organisation. On the other hand, Mother Jones stated in a 1907 letter to him “You were rocking the cradle of the movement, you made it possible for others to march on”

The Labour movement was seeking a platform to negotiate for a place in the national economic table discussions. Powderly helped to lay a framework for the Knights as the acceptable and recognized advocates and forum for advancing the workers class interests. The Knights attempted to unite all workers of an employer in an industrial union type structure. By their solidarity and public announcements, the organisation created the opportunity for labour unions to become a united political force that the government and employers might one day have to deal with.

3.2 Growing Militancy of Labour.

Mary Jones experienced the growing militancy of the unions and organised labour in the America of the 1870s when employers began to cut wages and she witnessed the government’s harsh response. America’s largest corporation at the time, Pennsylvania Railroad which employed 30,000, tried to cut wages by 10% and their workers went on strike in July 19th, 1877.

In Pittsburgh, state troops opened fire to disperse crowds of workers and 20 were killed, including women and children. This was followed by widespread riots, which almost destroyed the railway systems and led to a nationwide strike involving over 100,000 workers, during which at least 100 died and many others were wounded.

Mary claimed she played a part in this, but author Elliott Gorn considers this most unlikely. She may have been involved but was more likely an observer rather than an active participant. Events left a huge impression on Mary Jones and one suspects her involvement in labour matters deepened and grew.

3.3 The Molly Maguires

Earlier, other incidents in the mining community in 1875-1877 would have raised the interest of Mary Jones. These attempts to organise strikes in the coalfields of Pennsylvania by the secretive organisation of Irishmen known as the Molly Maguires resulted in the murder of a mine owner and foreman. 

The Irishmen involved had left Ireland in Famine times and went to work in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, especially in Schuylkill County. Dozens of publications have discussed an organisation called the Molly Maguires, yet its actual existence as a coherent organisation remains largely shrouded in silence. One has to question; how much of the Molly Maguire legend was a creation of what Eugene Debs later called “the corporate press (which) howled like fiends incarnate for their blood?”

While it is likely that a secret society (one of many) originated along the Ulster/Connaught border region in Ireland and was later transplanted by emigration to mining communities where oppression continued, it remains difficult to establish its composition as an organised and cohesive entity. Due to its clandestine and secretive interactions; many of those Irish involved spoke the native Irish language among themselves, and with the erratic nature of the violent activities taking place across the mining communities, it is impossible to precisely locate the Molly Maguires as a structured or independent organisation. It may have been largely a fictional creation of the Pinkerton Detective Agency to justify the repression of the coal miners and the elimination of their leaders.

It operated within the many layers of Irish organisations, some relatively open such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), while others like Clan-na-Gael, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the old Fenians cells remained closed. The true extent, if any, of its activist cell framework will probably remain largely a matter of conjecture.      

Many miners had joined the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) led by Irish born John Siney, to seek better wages, shorter hours and safer conditions. Failing to make any progress, and with an increasing number of attacks and murders of Irish union activists, groups of Irish miners began to retaliate and shoot strike-breakers known as scabs, bomb mines and railroad infrastructure.

Thousands of Irish miners worked in the coal pits of Schuylkill County as well as Luzerne, Lackawanna and other anthracite mines. Safety conditions did not exist, hundreds died and thousands were maimed in accidents. A fire at the Avondale pit in September 1869 caused the death of 110 miners, who were trapped below ground as the mine operator saved costs by failing to provide an exit.

The failure of a strike called following a 20% cut in wages in 1875, further increased the tension. Several Irish miners had been murdered during this strike, others were disappeared, and there was brutal retaliation by groups of Irishmen. Violent retaliation was considered as the only option available to the Irish community since the authorities were unwilling to prevent the attacks or bring those responsible to justice.

However, the Wiggins Patch massacre of members of the O’Donnell family on December 10th 1875 allegedly by elements of the local State militia brought things to a head. Mary Ann O’Donnell who survived the attack was married to John Kehoe, a bar owner who it was claimed was a leader of the Molly Maguires.

His star witness was a Pinkerton agent James McParlan, (later called McParland) an Irish Catholic from Co Armagh. McParland, who claimed to have infiltrated the secret band of miners gave testimony and orchestrated evidence which resulted in the execution of twenty of the Irish miners. These Irish miners with names such as Doyle, Donahue, Donnelly and Duffy, McManus, McDonnell, Campbell, Carroll, Boyle and Jack Kehoe were hanged in groups on June 21st 1877 and also later in 1878 and on October 9th 1879.

The evidence in many cases was very questionable, in some instances false, and the trial and public executions raised considerable bitterness in Irish communities.

Many regarded those who were hanged at the instigation and connivance of private corporations as martyrs for Ireland and the labour movement. (Kehoe was eventually pardoned by the Pennsylvania State governor in 1979, and acknowledged as being “a martyr to labor”, echoing the words of Eugene Debs over 70 years earlier).

Some of the miners were certainly members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), which was a conservative, sometimes very sectarian, Catholic fraternal organisation, but it was far removed from the criminality and murder with which Gowan smeared many of those men.  

Gowan succeeded also in smashing the existing labour organisations. He achieved this by linking and associating the terrorism of the Molly Maguires to the peaceful Workingmen’s Benevolent Association in the media and in the wider public mind. The WBA disintegrated, adding to the despair of the miners, curtailing their attempts to organise and effectively silencing by the terror of hanging, the most active union agitators.

Eugene Debs in an article on Appeal to Reason of November 23rd 1907, called those “ who perished upon the scaffold as felons were labour leaders, the first martyrs to the class struggle in the United States.”, he considered them “a link in the chain of the labor movement”  

This case attracted enormous attention at the time and the sense of anger and injustice was widely remembered in Irish community folklore. The Molly Maguires may have been spoken about in whispers and with a fear of reviving the past, but these men are commemorated in story, film and song within mining communities and in the public consciousness in Irish circles down to the present day. Every Irish trade union leader heard the story of the Molly Maguires from birth. Occasionally, it was used as a derogatory term for groups of Irish people.

In the Cork City of the early 1900s, violent clashes often broke out especially in the elections of 1910 between followers of the Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond (working with the Ancient Order of Hibernians run by Joe Devlin) and the All-For-Ireland- League, a faction led by William O’Brien. Redmond’s followers were known as “the Molly Maguires” or the “Mollies”

Unlike some of her later Irish male union organisers, Mother Jones was not going to be silenced by the tale of the hangings of the Molly Maguires and she found a very receptive audience among their sons and daughters, when she tramped the roads, as she travelled to speak in their mining communities’ less than a generation later. 

3.4 The Haymarket.

Chicago became the epicentre of the growing Labour movement and the campaign for the eight-hour day grew. The moderate Knights of Labour founded in 1869, had become less secretive and had increased its influence achieving close to a million members by the mid-80s. The Socialist Labour Party also developed a platform for working people increasingly influenced by immigrants who preached for the overthrow of capitalism.

Chicago became a magnet for working-class people attempting to make sense of their dire economic circumstances. Many radical anarchists, socialists, communist and trade unionist leaning immigrants had arrived from Europe and the economic booms and depressions gave them a ready audience among a growing disaffected and impoverished section of working-class people.  

 “From 1880 on, I became wholly engrossed in the labour movement… The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs”

Mary Harris – Mother Jones

May Day 1886 saw 300,000 people walk off their jobs across America to support the campaign for an eight-hour workday. Events initially escalated outside the McCormick Reaper factory in Chicago on May 3rd when demonstrators who were supporting striking workers attempted to block strike-breakers. Intervention by the police resulted in two deaths. The anarchist organisations then called for a public meeting for May 4th at Haymarket Square in Chicago. 

Only a few thousand turned up to what was a badly organised affair. Everything appeared normal until near the close of the meeting when a bomb was thrown at nearby policemen from an upstairs window. The explosion killed a policeman, wounded those nearby and led to wild shooting by the group of police present. Some witnesses contended that it was this wild shooting that caused the deaths of six more policemen and several people in the crowd.

Mother Jones claimed it was thrown by Rudolph Schnaubelt, a German anarchist. This was a widely held view at the time, but in recent years Professor Paul Avrich, author of The Haymarket Tragedy (1984), along with Dr Adah Maurer have both suggested that it was probably the latter’s grandfather, another German-born anarchist named George Meng who threw the bomb.   

In spite of huge political differences between “the small groups” of anarchists in Chicago and the wider labour movement represented by the Knights of Labour, scare tactics of the State authorities, organised industrial corporations, businessmen and sections of the media seized the opportunity to attack all organised labour.

Mother Jones in her autobiography stated the obvious

“The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement, a person who believed in the eight hour working day was, they said, an enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist”.

Mother Jones

The Haymarket affair contributed to the demise of old-style no-strike trade unionism as practised by the Knights of Labour. By 1890, membership had fallen to under 100,000, mainly older men. The American Federation of Labour (AFL), founded in 1886 created a confederation of craft unions under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. It then filled some of the vacuum in Labour organisation and it grew more powerful as union militancy grew. The AFL created a more centralised control structure by the national union officials and constituted a different approach to worker representation and solidarity in strike situations.

The Haymarket marked a turning point for Mary Jones and the American Labour movement which had seen the execution of four innocent men. It is unclear whether she was physically at the Haymarket on that evening, but she certainly campaigned for those convicted. The Parsons, Albert and Lucy had come to live in Chicago in the early 1870 and although active in the German community circles, they also joined the Social Democratic Party, later the Workingmen’s Party. So it is likely Mary Jones and the Parsons crossed paths.

“In the cemetery of Waldheim, the dead were buried. But with them was not buried their cause. The struggle for the eight hour day, for more human conditions and relations between man and man lived on, and still lives on.”

Mary Jones: determined to continue the struggle.

SIPTU, the Irish Trade union, formerly the Irish Transport and General Workers Union founded by Jim Larkin added a commemorative plaque to the monument at the Haymarket in May 2019.

3.5 Where was Mary?

From 1871 until the early 1890s Mary Jones disappears from the recorded history available to date. If one is to read the autobiography of Mother Jones she spends just two pages on the life of Mary Harris and Mary Jones, so effectively we are missing the story of Mary Harris Jones. Her chapters on the events of 1877 and 1886 appear to be written as a commentator rather than as an active participant.

She was just a thirty-four-year-old woman, alone in the world, with her belongings burned after the fire in Chicago. In spite of the traumatic events in her early life; did she just get on with living, trying to retain her economic independence through dressmaking, travelling, further educating herself, studying?……….she was just one of many millions of a poor unknown unrecorded underclass, anonymous, transient, trying to survive, experiencing the ups and downs of life in a working world that was experiencing unprecedented change.

Dale Fetherling suspected that Mary Jones visited Europe in the 1870s and 1880s to study labour syndicalist ideas. He mentioned countries such as England, Germany, France and Ireland as destinations she may have visited. No evidence of these travels has been found to date.

She probably did travel widely in America. Some newspaper reports state that she spent some time in San Francisco and in later years she regularly came and went to that city that had a large Irish working-class community.

She would certainly have come across Denis Kearney, born in 1847 at Oakmount near Kilbrittain in West Cork. Initially he went to sea and later settled near San Francisco and became an American citizen in 1876. Kearney became active in the Drayman and Teamsters Union. By 1877, Kearney had been elected secretary of the Workingman’s Party of California, made up mainly of Irish and German immigrants. However, Kearney’s oratory descended into populist racist attacks on the Chinese workers. Known as the Sand-Lots agitator, his often hysterical and violent racist language alienated many in mainstream Labour and the trade union movement. As Kearney’s influence waned by the early 1880s, he left public life and eventually ran an employment agency. He died in Alameda, California on the 24th April 1907.

Opposition to Kearney in San Francisco was led by a former Belfast born Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) organiser Frank Roney, a moulder by trade and a committed socialist and a radical left-wing Fenian. He was opposed to the Chinese labour also, but on the grounds that he regarded them more as strike-breakers and not willing to join trade unions.

The exiled Roney had embraced the cause of labour earlier during his time in Omaha and Salt Lake City. He was originally influenced by Chartism and the anti-slavery movement. Roney who died in January 1925 is a much-undervalued labour activist. Dr Ira B. Cross allows Roney to tell his own life story in a 1931 publication “Frank Roney, Irish Rebel & California Labor Leader, An Autobiography. University of California Press.”

In her later activist years, Mother Jones claimed that she lived in the U.S., “but I don’t know exactly where”. She continued “My address is like my shoes; it travels with me”. She had few possessions, it is difficult to locate her whereabouts. It’s safe to assume she became experienced at travelling in America, and observing the realities of life. In her survival years, she used this experience and her skills as a seamstress to earn her living. Mary rarely mentioned the period and this gap in the record of her life later became the basis for the Polly Pry smear attempts to destroy her reputation.

However, she did survive and the lessons and experiences of that survival period ensured Mary Jones reappeared in the subsequent decades as a committed activist and organiser. She then managed to adopt and adapt to her new image and exist without a permanent home base for the final four decades of her life when her reputation and fame became known to millions. Mother Jones had many loyal friends who looked after, mentored and encouraged her. That is a tribute to her practical ability to get on with life, using her experience to be willing to sacrifice everything in her crusade on behalf of the rights of all workers.

• Chapter 1: Mary Harris
• Chapter 2: Mary Jones
• Chapter 3: Surviving and Becoming Mother Jones
• Chapter 4: The Arrival of Mother Jones
• Chapter 5: Mother Jones: the Declining Years
• Chapter 6: Mother Jones Remembered and Celebrated
• Chapter 7: Mother Jones Some Observations
• Chapter 8: About Mother Jones