Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America.

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn Hill and Wang, 2001. 394 pages. $27.00.

She was an unlikely candidate to become America's most famous radical labor organizer. In 1867, Mary Harris Jones was a thirty-year-old former schoolteacher, married with four children, living in a rundown Irish Catholic neighborhood in Memphis. That summer, everything changed when her husband and all of her children died in a devastating yellow fever epidemic. Sometime later, she started going to union meetings. By the end of the century, she had transformed herself into one of the most compelling figures in American history. Still dressed in the black frock of mourning, now graced with gray hair, she added a few years to her age, referred to striking workers as her "children," and started calling herself Mother Jones. Then she really started raising hell. In a country premised on the inalienable right to reinvent yourself, hers was one of the most remarkable acts of them all.

In Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, the first thorough biography of this remarkable character, historian Elliott Gorn recovers the life of a woman who transformed herself and remade America's labor movement along the way. Gorn attempts to give us the real story of Mary Jones, the working class union organizer and backroom politician, at the same time that he recreates Mother Jones, the legend. He succeeds on both counts.

Born in Ireland in 1837, young Mary Harris witnessed the Irish potato famine, a spectacle of human suffering compounded by heartless indifference. In the famine's wake, she emigrated with her family to Canada, where she had a lace-curtain, Irish striver's upbringing in Toronto. In an age when working class women could read little and write less, she attended college and worked as a teacher.

In 1860, she married George Jones, who was active in Memphis's emerging labor movement, and they had four children in quick succession. Even quicker, yellow fever carried them away, while Mary Jones tended the sick in the city's Irish slums. Never again would she have a family of her own.

The nineteenth century widow had little financial support, but she was relieved of the obligations that family imposed. "Tragedy freed her for a life of commitment," Gorn notes.

From Memphis in 1867 to her emergence on the national stage as "Mother Jones" in 1901, she is barely visible in the historical record.

Gorn gives it his best, sorting facts from fictions (including some fibs that Jones passed off in her autobiography). Her political consciousness developed in Gilded Age Chicago, where industrialists grew rich off immigrant children and where Jones grew old as an underpaid seamstress.

Gorn neither confirms nor denies the rumors that Jones worked as a madam in a Colorado brothel in the 1880s and 1890s. The accusation was used to smear Jones throughout her career. In fact, there was somebody named Mary Jones in Denver in 1893, Gorn tells us, in a "female boardinghouse." Faced with the charges, all Mother Jones would say to fellow labor leader Terence Powderly was: "Don't you think whatever my past might have been that I have more than made up for it?"

Decade by decade, Gorn finds Jones attending more and more public meetings. By 1900, she had cast her lot with the United Mine Workers, then the nation's largest and most outspoken union. She dedicated the next twenty years to organizing. She appeared at nearly every important labor conflict to rouse awareness, sign up members, and keep morale high.

Her gift was speech, and her aim was action. She entered coal districts where few other organizers would go, and led strikes, parades, and demonstrations. Her rhetoric was of fiery and uncompromising class consciousness, loyalty to labor, and broad industrial unionism.

By the 1910s, Jones had honed her image and commanded a powerful speaking style. She moved easily among workers, attracted attention from the media, and struck fear into the hearts of mine operators in the hostile territories of Colorado and West Virginia. Her opponents threatened her, quarantined her under dubious medical circumstances, deported her across state lines, and even court-martialed her. But these actions only played into her media-savvy plans: Each time, Jones emerged speaking kind words to her jailers just long enough to get back in front of a cheering group of strikers and tell them what she really thought.

The persona of Mother Jones was one of the most brilliant creations in the history of American politics. It was a maternal image that reconciled complex family bonds in an age of mother love. One moment, she was the classic Victorian mother--soft, gentle, and loving as she cared for miners' children in strike camps. The next, she was a stern matriarch whose word was law.

Jones also highlighted the religious aspects of her motherhood. Borrowing liberally from biblical prose for her speeches, she played the part of a secular Mother Mary before audiences of Catholic immigrant workers. A smart tactic, but an ironic move for someone who insisted that "labor must be its own religion" and that "one hour of justice is worth an age of praying."

Mother Jones was also a feminine figure in a gendered age. Gorn gives an utterly fascinating account of the complex relationship between Jones and the men she called "my boys." "Be true to your manhood," she warned strikers whose morale was flagging. She castigated men for their weakness: "What is the matter with you?" Her maternal image gave her a public authority, but it never gave her institutional power. United Mine Workers offices remained closed to women like Mother Jones throughout her lifetime.

Jones knew what femininity could do for her, which is not to say that she was a pioneering feminist. She got her start by organizing women to march through the streets of central Pennsylvania coal towns armed with mops and brooms to clean out the scabs. Yet she devoted most of her life not to working women but to their husbands. She fought for wages high enough that men could keep "a quiet home, a well-fed, comfortable family."

Mary Jones thought the women's suffrage movement was a waste of time, best left to society ladies. Jones had almost no critique of the gendered hierarchy, not even of the system that kept her from a leadership position in the United Mine Workers. She just never made the connection.

On the other hand, it's hard to deny the compelling story of Mother Jones, a woman raised in poverty and saddled by ethnic and religious prejudice who nonetheless rose to national prominence in the most important social movement of her day. She spoke in public, she traveled alone, she drank whiskey out of the bottle and shared salty talk with mine workers, she said what she thought and did what she said.

If she never spoke the word "feminism," she nonetheless conveyed something very much like it through her actions.

Even though she was schooled in the lives of the saints, and didn't mind being compared with them, Mother Jones was not one of them.

Gorn makes little attempt to hide the blemishes on her record. She could be vain and petty. She could be uncompromising, as when she quit the United Mine Workers and the Socialist Party when neither group would move as far left as she wanted.

Jones also shared many of the racial assumptions of the white labor organizers of her day. She told racist jokes in her speeches, and she supported immigration restrictions, particularly against the Chinese. Gorn points out that Jones organized African Americans and Mexicans, as well as European immigrants. But he lets her off too easily, burying his discussion in the footnotes and deciding that "the dominant theme of her life and work was inclusion, not exclusion."

By 1930, Mother Jones was a national hero who had met with Presidents and now exchanged birthday telegrams with her former nemesis John D. Rockefeller Jr. At the end of her life, the image that she crafted defeated her, as the warm glow of age and gender made a grandmother out of this radical hellcat. Motherhood "could also be a trap," as Gorn puts it.

Gorn lets Mother Jones speak for herself in words that can rouse us. The point of Mother Jones is both what she said and how she said it. She "began with nineteenth century ideological tools ... and reshaped them for twentieth century battles," he writes. She lost more battles than she won, but her victory was in giving people "faith in themselves."

By restoring the person once called "the most dangerous woman in America," Gorn gives us the Mother Jones we need for our own times. He lets us hear the voice that filled dark mineshafts and dank union hall basements with impassioned rage. He makes her dangerous again.

Christopher Capozzola, a historian of American politics and culture in the twentieth century, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.