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Pictured is Mother Jones.

•September 5, 2018•

By Phil Luciano
Of the Journal Star, Peoria

She lost her own family, so she adopted a new one, a huge one, lifting up the cause of labor while rising to become one of the most famous women in American history.
In the process, Mother Jones became perhaps the greatest labor force in the history of Illinois, a state no stranger to workers’ movements. Barely over five feet tall, the dynamo who was Mary Harris Jones didn’t start speaking and organizing until her mid-50s, a peripatetic rabble-rouser nationally from the 1890s to 1920s – yet always with a heart for Illinois.
“Illinois ranks as a union birthplace, and Mother Jones was a midwife in that process,” says Mike Matejka, vice president of the Illinois Labor History Society. “She formed deep friendships with Illinois workers, from miners to union leaders, and continually returned to Illinois as a home base, roaming the state to mobilize and awaken the working class.”
In her heyday, no labor leader inflamed passion like Mother Jones. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, whose “The Jungle” excoriated the Chicago meatpacking industry, summed up Jones thusly: “All over the country she had roamed, and wherever she went, the flame of protest had leaped up in the hearts of men; her story was a veritable Odyssey of revolt.”
Yet she assumed that mantle only because of circumstance, then guile.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.