Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones : The Most Dangerous Woman in America. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Elliot Gorn’s monograph Mother Jones:  The Most Dangerous Woman in America rescues from obscurity a period and a persona critical to the development of labor, labor unions, capitalism, and politics in Twentieth Century America.  Gorn brings back to life an iconic figure whose connection to the magazine that bears her name:  Mother Jones, is all but lost with the mists of time and contemporary political wrangling.  He gives us a human being who was moved by personal loss, success, and commitment to ideals – a person from among the masses who found fame by moving the working class in the United States.  Along the line, Gorn also gives an overview of the American labor movement in general from the late Nineteenth Century through the First World War.  The book is an easy and informative read, and employs an interesting strategy in that it is less a biography of Mary “Mother” Jones than a history of the American Labor movement between 1893 and 1919 with Mother Jones as guide and protagonist.  This strategy provides Gorn the opportunity to look carefully at a very complex set of social problems and events, but through a wide-angle lens, rather than focus on a towering figure such as Eugene Debs.

Gorn begins in a way that instantly captured my attention by playing to my sensibilities as a historian.  He makes an attempt to tell us about Mary Jones’ early life in Ireland, Canada, and the United States, but admits almost immediately that  there is little or no evidence on which to base a very in-depth story.  This is emphasized by the fact that Gorn, despite extensive research in Ireland as well as the U.S. and Canada is unable to find enough information to give us much more than the six pages he complains is Mary’s own contribution to the question in her own autobiography.  He is thus stuck giving background, and making broad brush sweeps for three chapters while he attempts to give us some sense of the world a working class girl from Cork, Ireland, might have seen and experienced in the place of her birth, then as a young woman in Toronto and in Chicago.  We, as Gorn, are reduced to making guesses about what drove this woman to become the leading labor agitator that she undoubtedly was.

The fact that she did become a leading labor agitator in the United States is the irony that Gorn seizes, explaining, with some reason, that while she never saw herself as a public person worth writing about when she was Mary Jones, after the deaths of her husband and children, and her adoption of the name “Mother Jones” sometime after her journey in support of Coxey’s Army in 1893, she took on the persona of a labor leader – of the “mother” of all laborers, who would help them to find a fair exchange for their labor.

The persona of “Mother” Jones is really the object of this book, and its subject the struggles of American Labor in the first decades of the Twentieth Century.  Because Mary Jones, in her persona of the mother of laborers and the labor movement, had dealings with so many different groups – the UMW, and WFM, the American Socialist Party, and Populist politicians as well as President Woodrow Wilson, and capitalist John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,  Gorn is able to effectively use the experiences of Mother Jones as the narrative thread that allows him to talk about the coal miners’ strikes in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Colorado between 1901 and 1906, and about the ups and downs of the American Socialist Party and the labor movement in general from the 1893 march of  Coxey’s Army to the end of the First World War.  The real genius of the work is that it is able to avoid concentrating narrowly on the big names of labor and radical politics, such as Eugene Debs, and instead use Mother Jones as the narrative driver.  This allows him to get at the ground work in the labor movement, because national figure though she was, she was an organizer first and foremost – a pragmatic but rational leader in the trenches – so Gorn can use her story to narrate American Labor history in a more grass-roots sort of way.  A story that weaves between the East Coast bituminous coal mines, the ore and coal mines of Colorado, and political conventions in Chicago, along with labor union strategy meetings and trials of organizers would be too disconnected a mass of data for a readable book without such a thread.

Gorn’s book is useful.  Placing Mother Jones at the center of the labor movement of the early twentieth century allows him to illuminate a very complex network of politics, leaders, and differing groups of laborers and issues that are not easily discussed in context, but make little sense if separated from each other.  One of the most illuminating sections of the book was the section on the “Children’s Crusade” of Mother Jones.  As I read it, I expected Gorn to complete a moral rampage against the institution – not that I have any sympathy at all for employers of children, but the story has been told many times.  Instead, Gorn was able to discuss the situation from the point of view of Mother Jones as a labor strategist, and as a member of the working class and as an organizer for the UMW.  These three roles, Gorn makes clear, often complimented each other, but more often than one might expect they were in conflict, as well.  Mother Jones’ concern for child laborers makes much sense when we understand her, as Gorn does, as a mother who had lost her own biological children.  Yet Gorn also shows us the “Mother” Jones whose persona included all laborers as her “children” willing to exploit the exploitation of children in factories for gains for all of labor in general.  As an organizer for the UMW, and a labor activist in general, her goals were limited (in the case of the girl textile workers in Pennsylvania, only a small rise in wages, not emancipation from labor altogether, as their parents apparently needed the income) and compromised with the perceived needs of the union and of the adult laborers.  Her view of child labor as being in competition with adult wages was also a very pragmatic viewpoint.  Her brilliant use of the children in her march from Pennsylvania to New York City and ultimate attempt to see President Roosevelt, punctuated by an effective if offensive caging of children at Coney Island to make a point about their labor conditions shows that to reach her goal, drastic and exploitative propaganda was not beyond her either.  The immense complexity of labor issues in the United States in the early twentieth century comes through perhaps most clearly in this section of the book.

In his discussion of Mother Jones’ brief respite from labor organizing to become a speaker for the Socialist Party of  America, Gorn shows the party in all its division, diversity, and complexity.  He explains the Progressive Era, and the role that the Socialist Party played as a kind of catch-all for radicals who were not satisfied with the minor reform approach of Roosevelt and the Progressives.  This made the Socialist Party a populist group in itself, and it came to include dissenters from rural areas, miners, factory laborers, middle class business owners and professionals, intellectuals, and many others who shared only a few major points of interest, the largest of which was an anti-corporate agenda.  This hodgepodge made the Socialist Party both reflective of America in its diversity, and extremely hard to organize and direct.   The very difficulty of doing this eventually led Mother Jones to leave the party and eschew political reform for what she considered to be most important – economic reform.  Gorn describes this in a way that provides insight into American society of the period as well.  He shows that while socialist theory assumed that the interests of workers and of the party would be the same, in fact, the party’s emphasis on political reform, and its encompassing of so many diverse groups, meant that it was often more politically radical, and economically less effective, than the union movement, and than the laborers needed it to be.  Mother Jones’ opinions here – that labor organizing is more effective, and solves the main problem, which is the low wages and poor living conditions of laborers, that politics involves too much compromise and works too slowly – become synechdoche for the larger set of opinions of American laborers, who seemed, Gorn says, to be more interested in improving living conditions than in politics.

One interesting bit of evidence that Gorn gives here is his explication of Mother Jones’ opinions on women’s suffrage.  Initially in support of it, Gorn notes that her persona appealed to a particular part of the working class – families – as a social conservative, while at the same time she was an economic and political radical.  She wanted economic reform, and saw women in pragmatic ways as dragging down wages in the labor market, and as poorly treated.  Her goal was to build strong families, and remove women from the horror and low pay of the work place by improving the social standing and income of their husbands.  Her persona as “mother” did not allow her to recognize the difficulties of single women in the workforce.  Being Mother Jones did require that she see the difficulties of households that required double income from parents simply for survival.  For Mother Jones, then, for women to gain the vote became almost irrelevant.  Progress, she thought, was made in labor disputes and corporate negotiations, not through voting, and women needed to be most concerned with supporting their families by operating the domestic side of life.

Gorn finishes his book with a description of the changes wrought by World War I.  The national security emergency that the war brought on forced the Socialists to compromise their views, as they did in Europe, and support the war and nationalism.  It also brought an end to radical social comment because it seemed to threaten the nation and the social fabric that allowed the United States to participate in the war.  The war also brought increased wages and increases in economic output in the United States, raising the standard of living for most Americans in a way that even labor agitation had not been able to.  These things eventually stole the thunder from Mother Jones, the Unions, and the labor movement in general.

In all, Gorn’s book provides us with a fascinating look at a character who was at the center of working class problems and politics during the first 25 years of the Twentieth Century.  The character provides Gorn with a lens on the issues and events that is, because of her own working class background and connections, very close to the events on the ground during this period.  For these reasons, this is a very useful book.  It not only details labor-related events’ of the period well, but provides context and a complex look at the maze of connections between people, events, and ideas in the United States at the time.  Still, as a general history, Gorn does not seem to have found much new.  The narrative of the labor movement here seems to be the same as the broad sweep defined by earlier historians – just more detailed, and through a different lens.