Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that usually is about a cool person who did cool stuff. But sometimes I start writing a script and then I find out halfway that I feel differently than I did when I started. I'm your host, Margaret Giljoy, and with me today is my guest Lori Penny. Hi, Laurie, how are you?
I'm all right. Thanks. You've got a huge storm here in DC where I'm recording, but now I'm great. It's really really nice to be back on the show.
I'm about to have a very similar storm, probably the same storm. I'm really confused by this. I know that weather is definitely what people listen to the show to hear about, because normally weather here goes from West Virginia towards DC and not the other way. I don't know, I don't know what's happening. Everything's wild. This is the most important thing that's happening this week. But also important is our producer Ian Hi.
Ian Hey, Margaret, Hey, Laurie. How are you guys today?
Good? We're good. People usually get to say hi to you when you're the audio engineer, but you're not the audio engineer today. The producer. Our audio engineer is Rory.
No good, I'm not the audio engineer. Oh my god, am I Yeah?
No, yeah, Laurie is going to be in charge of audio.
Oh dear, this is going to be rapidly, rapidly descending chaos.
That's just good.
Mean, it's in Los Angeles where there is no weather at all.
Ever, Oh, it's actually quite warm right now. I'm not a fan, but you know, we make do.
I was told when I lived there that there were four seasons hot, real, hot, on fire, and lakers.
That's hilarious and accurate. That's really good. Okay, I'm stealing that.
That's good. That's good.
But our audio engineer is Rory, and everyone's sahat to Rory because I'm weird about this.
Hi, Rory, Rory, Rory.
And our theme music was written for us by n Woman. Everyone comes to this show for the hard hitting journalism on the topics of today. So I'm here to tell you the hottest take about a woman who was born in eighteen thirty seven and died almost one hundred years ago. But it's going to be a pure killjoy episode. You ever heard of Mother Jones?
I have, well, I've thought. I know that there was a person who inspired the magazine. Yep, a union organizer. Yeah, that's about all I know.
Okay, okay, Ian, you heard anything about Mother Jones very vaguely.
I know there's like a political YouTube channel I follow that is named Mother Jones. I'm assuming there's some relation there, but maybe not.
I don't know.
They're probably related to the magazine.
Yeah, who that makes more sense.
I don't think we'll have legal trouble with what I'm about to say.
That's a great way to start.
Mother Jones the person. I am not going to opine one or the other about the magazine at any point this week. Mother Jones the person was kind of a fraud.
Huh.
Okay. So there's a version of Mother Jones that you can tell, you can say Mother Jones was an elderly Irish peasant woman who wore black morning gowns that she made herself. She tramped all throughout coal country with a pistol in her dress. She could out drink and out cuss the miners, and she led strike after strike. She was a woman who organized black workers alongside white ones. She involved women directly in labor struggle. She helped make
the union. She was part of some of the most popular unions in the country, and she even helped found that pod favorite the Industrial Workers of the World. You could tell the story all of those things I said are technically true her. I'd also be lying. But Mother Jones can't complain if I lie, because Mother Jones lied constantly about everything.
And she's also dead.
So that's true. Well, she says as much. I don't trust her, trust but verify. Yeah, exactly exactly. So we'll be at the end of this, we'll be going to I think Illinois where she's buried, just to make sure she's down there.
Could it be Minnesota or one of the other states that begins with them, I don't really know American geography.
No it's Illinois. Yeah, no, which is near a Minnesota. There's more than one labor cemetery in Illinois, so near a Minnesota.
I did not know there was a North and South Minnesota, not.
A one, right, fair enough? Wait, no, we should I'm trying to get into the habit of the spirit of Mother Jones. Oh no, there's totally two Minnesota's, and I'm from which everyone.
Is more radical West Minnesota.
Yeah, exactly, Yes, exactly.
And an enclave of revolutionary fervor.
Yeah, exactly. And I've been there forever. I am a thousand years old, just like Mother Jones. It is kind of funny because I do constantly refer to West Virginia as the better Virginia.
I always call it good Virginia.
Yeah, yeah, excellent. Yeah, the one that didn't fight for slavery in exists because they didn't want to. Yeah exactly.
You know I didn't know that.
Oh yeah, no, though, West Virginia split off from Virginia because they were like, well, we could fight and die over owning people, but we don't want to. And I'd like to say it's because all the white people here were like anti racist. It's because they were all poor and they didn't own enough people to be worth dying over.
Also in its own way, fairness.
I know, sometimes what you lack in other moral qualities you make up for by being.
Poor anyway, sea.
Yeah, no, I mean honestly, I was gonna say, that's like kind of Mother Jones's thing too. So she lied so much much that it's almost impossible to sort out fact from fiction in her biography. But historians have done their best and This is why I know she lied so much, is because even historians who are trying to like her are like, and then she said this, that is an exaggeration, or this is not technically possible to be true.
You're gonna tell me that her name wasn't really mother?
Okay. I think her name probably was actually Jones, but I'm not certain. And there was another Mother Jones before her, and she stole the name.
Wow.
But I'll get to that, like no, like all the way down. She also was probably a mother at some point. I don't know, we'll get to it, Okay. There is no reason to offer the benefit of the doubt about anything we can't prove about her because she lied constantly. And I probably don't talk about this much on the show. I'm not sure. I hate liars just reflexively. You can't trust anything they say. If they lie about one thing, they're lying about lots of other things. Mother Jones is
a messy figure by pretty much any realistic account. I spent all week looking for anyone calling her out. No one's willing to. That's why I'm here with the hard hitting journalism. Wow. Okay, By any realistic account, she is a fraud she lied about who she was, She yanked another woman's name, and she was probably grifting and did
not keep track of the money she fundraised. She has been heroized and canonized sometimes kind of like literally like all of her stuff was very religious, even though she was personally agnostic. But she used very religious iconography and was quite excited when people used it to refer to her.
I'm a Catholic, Yeah, yeah, right.
Very much so, even though she wouldn't identify that way. But she's from a very Catholic background. In all of her way, she talks about things as very Catholic. People tell the partial story. She organized black and white workers. That much is true. She also, to the end of her days, was wildly racist who organized against Asian immigration. Didn't just talked shit on Asians and used racist terms to refer to them, but actively organized against Asian immigration
into the country. She complained about Japs and Hindus stealing American jobs and also about them replacing the national character.
That sounds oddly familiar.
As an Irish person.
Yeah, uh huh, who was an immigrant of the country, right, yeah, came over when she was fourteen or something. She organized women and got them involved in strikes. She was also opposed to women's suffrage. There were other radical women at the time who were opposed to women's suffrage because they were like voting as a distraction, right yeah, or even people who were like, oh, the suffrage movement isn't class conscious enough. It's a bunch of upper middle class white women, you know whatever.
Right, Emma Goldman was pretty agnostic about the whole thing.
Right, right, Yeah, exactly. Emma Goldman didn't refuse to support women's suffrage because she believed that a woman's place was in the home. Mother Jones did. She supported traditional women's roles. Women belonged in the home, raising kids and cleaning and cooking for their hard working men.
This was eighteen fifty something.
So she's actually doing most of her work around the turn of the century, like nineteen hundred.
So I was going to say, how long had this idea even been traditional for I When we think of this, you know, women should stay in the home, cooking and cleaning for the men's as some kind of ancient, ancient tradition, but it was really very much associated with the industrial revolution and that necessity of abiding labor that way. So it's like this traditional natural role, even at the tenth of the century. This was about one hundred years old. Max.
That makes some sense. And actually, weirdly, she only started kind of taking that sort of role once she gets married to like an iron molder at some point. Oh right, yeah, and so okay, and then the other final thing, well, I mean final thing. I'll be talking about her all week. But she wasn't as radical as she makes herself out to be. She was usually on the left side of any given union, although she was in the middle of the road unions and then on the left side of those.
It's absolutely fair to say she was a socialist. But she uh before the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is the most militant labor uprising in the United States besides the one that happened in the Civil War, when black people had a general strike that won the Civil War. Before Blair Mountain, Mother Jones lied to the workers to get them to go home. She went to the governor and was like, Hey, I'll get the workers to go
home instead of having an armed uprising. Don't worry. And she went to the workers and was like, I got a letter in my pocket, a telegram direct from the President. That says, if you all go home, he'll listen to your demands. And they were like, okay, let's see the telegram. And she was like, no, I don't want to. I don't want to show you goes to a different school.
And she was lying, and there was no telegram.
No, there was no telegram. So the miners went to war. I really wanted to like Mother Jones. When I started, I was like even kind of like, well, she wasn't really an anarchist, but she's doing all this cool stuff. She's like a goth and she's like running around and cussing and organizing.
You know, goths being the most political subculture, as we all know. I'm a goth. I'm a lapsed goth. I know you're a Goth's let's be real. Let's be real. Politics aren't essential to that subculture.
No, no, But she wore black morning dresses everywhere and she sewed herself. That's cool, It is cool.
Yeah, I know people who do that now, and not all of them. Not everybody who wears black morning dresses that they sow themselves is also covert or overt racist union organizer. It's not necessary. It's an esthetic first subcult. John, you can stick there if you want, and maybe you should.
When I came up into the goth scene, it was like super a political exactly where I was, and so I had that impression about goths forever. And then I was like, oh, actually, goths do skew overall like Conna Lefty.
Yeah, London and UK goths similar. It's aesthetic sort of politics are an offshoot of a certain kind of culture. Yeah, but there are many ways to be polyssicized by the essential feeling of being an outsider, not all of them once we might support.
Yeah, fortunately that's true. So Mother Jones more or less everything we know about Mother Jones for the first fifty seven, maybe sixty years of her life come from a source that should be very reliable. Mother Jones. But she is a self made woman, and by that I mean her history has been self made, and there's very little for the first sixty years of her life that historians can confirm.
That's nuts.
I know, nobody ever like saw her in public or anything and wrote it down.
I guess not really.
Like she shows up on a couple like census records and shit, right, but she claims that she's like part of everything for years. No, she like comes onto the scene in eighteen ninety four, and so everything from before then she's just making up. Or she was a bit player. We don't know, and there's no reason to give it her the better of the doubt, right, Yeah, And this doesn't mean that we should write off what she has to say about her past. It's just that we should
take it with an entire shaker of salt. She was storytelling, as one of my friends puts it, very much, not one to let the truth get in the way of a good tale. Her autobiography, that she wrote near the end of her life when she was in her late eighties, is a work of fiction. It skims over her early life in just a few pages. She's got no interest in telling the story of Mary Harris as she was born, or Mary Jones as she spent her early adult life. She wants to tell you the story about Mother Jones,
a persona that she became. She claims she was born in the city of Cork in Ireland in eighteen thirty on May first.
My family were in Cork in the eighteen thirty three.
And I was actually wondering what part of Ireland your family was from.
Here cook a Bear Island, which is not in fact in Ireland. It's a peninsula just outside Cork.
So it'll take the Rhode Island of Ireland. Rhode Island isn't an island. I know you don't know America.
Yes, I mean there's a lot wrapped up in that statement which I'm going to gloss over. But sure, yeah, Bear Island is just like Rhode Island.
Okay, great, can't wait to go to Providence, Ireland.
There's a box factory mixed boxes for other factories.
Well, if you if your family was in Cork in eighteen thirty, you could make up stuff and it would be just as likely to be true, maybe more likely to be true. Then what Mother Jones has to say about I think.
My No, my great grandfather was Mother Jones. Let's go with that.
Yeah, absolutely, you can't disprove this. No, oh my god, Mother Jones is a trans woman. No, I don't want her. I don't want her.
Oh.
No, she was not born in eighteen thirty on May first. She was born in eighteen thirty seven, and we have no idea what day she was born. She was probably not born on May Day. She didn't start telling people she was born on May Day until she was in her sixties, and May Day was a labor holiday. She was most likely born in the city of Cork in County Cork in Southern Ireland, to parents who spent some of their time in the city and some of their time in a town of like twelve buildings outside the
city that her mother's from. She was baptized as Mary Harris on August first, nineteen thirty seven. Her mother likely grew up in a mud wall, dirt floored hut that her family built themselves but still had to pay rent on because colonial Ireland sucks and that's what every Catholic family there at the time had to do. Mary herself probably grew up in the Catholic sums slums of the city, choked with animal shit from nearby markets. Her parents weren't literate,
but she was probably from a young age. The nuns at a nearby convent who offered free education to poor girls, was like a few blocks away from where she probably lived.
I believe at the time that there was a big push to educate the children, even of the working class, specifically in reading and writing in English.
Okay, oh shit, yep, it's still bad education for you, but.
In order to make the kids and the upcoming generations fluent in English. First, Yeah, this is one of the reasons that free education is pushed quite a lot. Citation needed, but the over that between education in English and the systematic eraser of Irish language. Yeah, it's important at that time.
No, that makes sense. That was actually one of the reasons why I was. I knew your family's fairly Irish. Why had you? Honestly, I guess Mother Jones would like to play up how politically turbulent the area was when she grew up, talking about seeing radicals hanging from scaffolds everywhere. This is not true. It was a tense time and place. People were rioting and early Irish labor union stuff we've
covered a couple times on this show. It tended less towards like let's form a union and more like let's cross dress and kill our landlords through secret societies like the Molly Maguires and the Ribbon Men and the funnelly named White Boys. She claimed that her grandfather was hanged fighting for Irish freedom. This is not true. There's no When I first wrote this script, right, I was like, oh, it seems like that might not be true. Like, no,
it's just she's fucking lying about everything. It is possible people did a lot of work, found some records. That is possible that she had a great uncle or something who was shipped off for Australia for doing secret society work. Like it is possible that her family had some connections to this stuff. She tells a story about how her father escaped to America at a fishing vessel as troops looked for him, combing the city of Cork with Irish heads on the bayonets of their rifles.
Hang on, they went through the whole city with heads on the top of a rifle. That seems both ludicrous and.
Inefficient physically arduous.
It's a thing we said we'd do it.
Yeah. The British are like, this is our workout system.
Everyone's a cost now. It's not political.
Yeah, And what really frustrates me about this is that you can tell the truth about colonial oppression in Ireland in the eighteen thirties, there's about to be a genocide. Right ten years later she lives through that genocide. That genocide is why her father fled. It wasn't political persecution. It was the persecution of all of the Irish people. There was no evidence of soldiers with heads on their bayonets marching through the city, and there's no evidence that
her father was special. It is nearly certain that mother Jones's father went to America for the same reason. Two million other Irish folks left the island at the time that he did, which was eighteen forty seven. The Potato famine, when English starved Ireland by forcing them to try and subsist off of only potatoes in the middle of a blight and started kicking everyone out of their houses and shit. A million people starved to death and two million people left.
Which is not a piece of history that is taught in British schools.
Oh really, Like, what do they say about the Irish Famine? What'd you grow?
They don't. No. I learned this all from a fantastic book called The Blood Never Dried, A people's history of the British Empire.
That was a fucking good name.
I read about ten years but no. Most history education in the UK, of which Ireland is not part. Obviously, most history education in the UK there's a lot of focus on the Tudors. We go almost up to the English Civil War, and then there's a sort of Russia, and then we sort of pick up again around World War One. Seriously, like it is very it's not only common, it's usual for British kids to study history even up to the age of eighteen and not learn a line of imperial history.
That's fucking wild. Because as much as the American educational system did not teach me a proper history education, I did learn about, like some of the great evils of America, Like I learned a fair amount about slavery, you know, and some of it was even true.
The impression I got was that in terms of post settler history, well, there's not as much to hell, so if you skip over certain bits, you're skipping over quite a lot of it. But the impression I got was that people might be taught different versions of what happened, but it's still mentioned. Like don't some people call it the War of Northern Aggression?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, that's when I heard. Recently, we just don't learn about the colonization of Ireland at all.
But did you learn in school about how important saving money through deals and advertisements is?
No? I don't know what they taught us because no I didn't.
Oh, well, we're here to educate you as and the next the next AD is for Latin classes. The show is brought to you by sumus esta sunt aram aras arrant aramas aratus arrun.
Iran ran.
I don't know. I fucking yeah, thanks, I can conjugate one word in Latin. Wrong, here's ads.
And we're back.
The Irish saying goes according to the history book I just read. I mean it was passed down to me by my grandmother mother Gentz. Yeah, my grandmother, your uncle, Oh that okay, huh, your great great grandfather, your great great grandfather always said God created the potato plate, but the English made the famine. So when Mary was like ten years old or so, her dad and her older brother left for Canada to work on the railroads. And this meant her older brother off to go work the railroads.
He's twelve. They went aboard one of the infamous Coffin ships alongside twenty thousand other refugees, not on the same ship, but the Coffin ships had about two hundred thousand other refugees in eighteen forty seven. It's called Black forty seven. Typhus raged on the ships. The travel is five weeks long. Of those who left County Cork, one in ten died in the passage that year. Thirty percent of the survivors in Toronto died within the next year, so it is
not good times coming to Canada. Dad survived, so does brother. They make their way to Burlington, Vermont, where he and his son appear on census records, so we know it happened. Mother Jones was, in her odd way, a patriot and insisted that her father was a US citizen and not Canadian. There is no reason to believe her about anything. Ever, within a few years, her father and her brother, who was twelve when he left, they had saved up enough money to get the rest of the family over and
they settled in Toronto. She probably went to Catholic school and then lied and said she went to public school. Her whole vibe is so fucking Catholic, and she constantly refers to things in religious terms, but she hates the church, which is relatable, and she downplays this part of her history. She lived with her family and a few like bonus kids,
like poor kids. The family was taken care of in a tiny house and they had a tiny yard with five cows, so they were actually like doing better than the average Irish family over the Catholic Irish family at the time. There was a whole bunch of Protestant Irish immigrants in Toronto at the time who outnumbered them and would get into like little ethnic wars in Toronto and go run and kill Catholics and parade around with their heads. No,
you don't have to do whatever. Anyway, young Mary probably learned dressmaking, and when she was twenty she started getting a teaching certificate at the Toronto Normal School, which was a state run school. Yeah, totally. It's a very normal thing.
The ones where they don't teach macket.
Yeah, yes, the antiog warts.
I know.
That's why she didn't last.
Door to the Xavier Academy.
Yeah, she didn't last because it wasn't the Xavier Academy and it was a state run school to teach teachers, and it was free and students got their tuition paid for plus books a stipend. So it's actually a pretty cool system that they set up. But she was the only Catholic woman's student in the entire school, and she didn't last. There's only one other Irish Catholic period, and I think people probably made fun of her, and shit, I don't know. At twenty three, she left home for
Michigan to take a teaching job at a convent. She doesn't talk about this much. And now she's off to live in a third country, the one that she eventually becomes Mother Jones in America. And for this next huge chunk of her life, we have only her own story to go on, which means I don't believe it, but whatever, I'll tell it because it's the story of Mother Jones, and I'll just be really cynical the whole time. And this is basically a behind the Bastards episode that I got.
I started recording, and I like the middle of Tuesday, I was like, shit, I'm locked into this subject.
Yeah, we've gone so far, we can't go back now.
Yeah.
I understand that the behind cool people who did cool stuff is that these people are so good and possibly even nice, but like being this much of a fabulous there, there's some there's kind of a flex there.
That's true, that's true. I honestly I was ready to have her. I made up my whole backstory be okay when she was a super radical who like did all this like anti racist organizing and like you know, uh, like led workers into militant struggle. Finding out she also like was an anti immigration racist and oh was she yeah? Or yeah she lied about that. No, I think that's
the one thing I can trust her about. And also that like two hundred pages into a biography of her, I find out she's probably pocketing all the money she found.
Racists did just keep on coming.
And at that point I'm like, nah, you're a fraud. But but she also does interesting stuff. She is interesting. She's an interesting self made mythological figure in American history. It's like if Paul Bunyan was a guy who made himself.
Up as a trounding guy.
Yeah. So she winds up in Michigan. She's a secular teacher. She gets paid eight dollars a month. That is all of three hundred and three dollars a month today people are not getting paid well. In the eighteen fifties, she lasts less than a year before she went off to Chicago to become a dressmaker and then wanderlust is still honor. So she went off to Memphis, Tennessee to teach again. Where she married a white man named George Jones in
eighteen sixty. He was a union man, an iron molder, and this is one of the better paid skilled labor jobs available to the urban working class. Tennessee is an interesting place to move to in eighteen sixty because although you probably learn more about the American Civil War than you did about the Irish Famine in your public schools, Yeah, because.
The American Civil War is covered in its own small way by the chipmunks. Do America no, for real? That's how I learned about things like the Pilgrims.
I would assume that it would be like they just teach you about it because y'all got rid of slavery decades before us, and so you could just like flex on us.
Did do that. I actually did some reathing into that recently, just like primed for Like, wait, I'm sure we didn't do this. I'm having read a lot of other history.
But no, No, America was a uniquely slave empire.
There were some people who were really genuinely driven simply by morality, including a lot of working class people who just really didn't have much contact with the reality of empire whatsoever.
Yeah, Okay, anyway, that's no, no, it's okay.
It's suppression, not the heroes in almost any of the stories, as is writ and proper.
Ah.
But what's really funny is when compared to America around slavery, they usually show up as they good guys. We've done a couple where the British show up in like armed slaver vaults and shit. But Tennessee is in the South and eighteen sixty is the year before the Chipmunks kick off the Civil War.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's amazing how long they lasted after the original founding fathers Alvin Simon and theater right, yeah, these were the sons of those chips right exactly.
And so in Memphis, Tennessee, the fam and Irish were the only workers cheap enough to hire to compete with unfree labor, and so the Irish lived in a neighborhood called Pinch short for pinch Gut, which was called that because everyone's so skinny. They're starving or they're starving so
they're skinny. And it is mostly free black and Irish folks living in the Pinch, and spoiler alert, the Irish immigrants were some of the most anti black racists in US history because the Irish were like the next up up the racial hierarchy. They were above black folks, so they had something to prove. And I promised up top that mother Jones was racist. But to make it clear, she is in one hundred percent pro black and tried very hard to fight against anti black racism. She was
racist against Asian people. Her husband, George Jones. First of all, okay, there's a part of me that thinks he was never even fucking married. I don't know, Like.
George Jones sounds pretty fake. I'm not gonna it does.
So does marriage.
And then but it's really intense about it. Well, I'll get to what's intense about it in a minute, but just sit with the fact that I have no idea if this man's real. It probably is. There's probably even a census thing on it. I didn't find the like no historian I was reading specifically, It was like, here's the census records on George S. Jones. But George Jones, the totally real man, was in the International Iron Molders Union, which is at the time the strongest union in Civil
War America. War caused inflation, which caused the rich to get richer. So have skilled laborers who built the engines of war fought for their rights. But I regularly on the show end up talking about the fact that nineteenth century and unionism in the US was it is more accurate to call them white supremacist organizations and labor organizations,
and the iron Molders were no different or better. One of the earliest strikes by the iron workers was in Richmond, Virginia in eighteen forty seven when white workers refused to train black workers, and so they went on drake in eighteen sixty Yeah, because they refuse to train black people. They were like, you're trying to make me train black people. I won't do it.
This is in bad Virginia.
Yeah, bad Virginia, which is actually at the time all Virginia, because it has the split hasn't happened, but it is still in Richmond, Virginia's in bad Virginia. In eighteen sixty Iron Molders called for all workers in the US to support the preservation of the union and the status quo and to fight explicitly against abolition because the slaves will steal all our jobs if we freedom. This sucks and this is credit where it's due a break between the
American labor movement and the labor movement of Europe. The rest of the world, at least Europe looks at the US and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, like, where for the emancipation of the working class that includes the black people who don't get paid because the US labor movement has always been built a little different. But okay,
also credit words due. After the war, the Iron Molders looked at the situation and decided to organize across racial lines, and therefore were maybe one of the first unions in the US to do so. Many of them were themselves racist, but when they formed the National Labor Union, they insisted that black people, women, and immigrants be allowed to join so they wouldn't compete for jobs, which is the actual right way to handle that.
What is it?
Persila Lagwin says, I don't know if you've ever read The Telling.
I haven't.
It's Oh my goodness, it's my favorite book in the Hainish cycle. And the characters in this book talk about heroism, and it turns out in the language that is being translated from the story of the Telling on this planet there's no concept of heroism. The closest word they can get to means somebody who has made amends for a great role.
That's cool. I always loved the Gwin's so good. I should just do her as an episode. When do I find something bad? Oh no, I'd be crushed.
No you can't, you can't. I think that.
I know. I know. It's like when you have like a rash or something that's never happens to me. I don't get rashes. I'm not gross. But you have someone else google it so that you don't like think you have cancer.
You know, Yeah, I have done this speed.
Yeah that's true.
You understand that this is the thing that's happened.
Yeah yeah, so maybe yeah, maybe I'll have to check things out. Yeah there's some like sketchy stuff around her dad, but I don't want to get into that. It's a total tangent. He's an anthropologist who kept a guy from another race as a like look at this guy like it was like from a tribe that hadn't had contact with Western civilization or whatever. Anyway, that's not like Gwen's fault. So and nor is this about LeGuin is about Mother Jones and we don't know what mother Jones is doing
during the war. I know what she said was that her and her husband were quietly pro union and anti slavery, but it wasn't exactly a safe thing to be vocal about because Memphis was like in the fighting, right, Like.
There were people running down the streets of Memphis with heads on the ends of their bank.
But this is more likely to be true in this case, but still probably not. Yeah, exactly, So she's like, oh, you know, we were quietly pro union, but I don't know. I actually probably believe her about this, but she has earned zero benefit of the doubt. Her husband wasn't a white supremacist organization, although you know, again they did mend
their ways. The other thing I know about Memphis and the Irish in Memphis is that shortly after Civil War, on May first, eighteen sixty six, her birth Yeah, on her birthday, the Irish went on a fucking racist rampag led by the Irish cops and firefighters at the front of the mob. They killed forty six black people, committed lots of sexual violence, and burned houses and churches and schools. And it was a Memphis guy who went on to
start the fucking KKK. So right, Irish Memphis, good on you if you stood out against that.
But anyway, I've been reading recently about the political history of Irish Catholics in America over the last century. And actually it was an essay about Joe Biden and about how Biden and the Kennedys, by identifying strongly as Irish Catholics, this was a way of positioning themselves as not those kind of white people, right, they have a sort of
inheritance of oppression. The Irish Catholics in America are sort of positioned in the national story at that time as the bridge between sort of more trad white racism and the African American experience. And this is flying in the face of all of that.
Yeah, So, I you know, I've covered a lot of like nineteenth century Irish Americans on this show, and usually
they're kind of overall. Ireland didn't send their best and specifically because of the way that race was constructed in the United States and the like offer of whiteness was made available, and because it's true that the Irish weren't white, they were not black, there was a racial hierarchy that Irish were kind of in the middle of on the Lowish end, and it was both their Irishness and their Catholicism actually distinctly Catholicism was like, oh, you're loyal to
the Pope instead of us. Is like the big threat of them. And then the fact that they were I think we covered this in a recent episode of this show, the fact that they were Celtic. In the nineteenth century race science version of the world put them lower on the wrung than the Germans who were Teutonic, and the Teutonic are closer to the real good white people, the Anglo Saxons, so who were.
Largely wiped out by this point, actual Saxons.
Yeah, I mean that's like when the Nazis called themselves arian or whatever the fuck, you know, Like, race science is not science, it's some fucking storytelling.
Yeah, everybody in the South of England is kind of Norman, let's be anyway.
So overall, the Irish were anti black in America, I think that that is a fair overall thing to say. They were very heavily involved in the Democratic Party, which was the more racist party in the nineteenth century around the Civil War, and one of the reasons they were involved in it is that the Republican Party was super Protestant and super anti Catholic, and so they were like, if we care about the working class white people, were going to be Democrats. But that means we're also going
to be part of the more racist party. And you do have a difference where like the Northern Democrats were like, whereas the Southern Democrats were like, we are the fucking slavers, right, The Northern Democrats were like a little bit blurri or
about all of it. It's fascinating stuff. And there also is a ton of like Irish Republicanism that like, you know, did most of the Free of Ireland, the almost Free of Ireland that happened, A lot of them had lived in America, Like a lot of them came to America for a while, and then we're like, all right, we raised some money here, let's go back and you know, shoot the British people until they go away. It's just
it's messy. And there's also a ton of like there are also a ton of Irish folks who are doing really amazing work in nineteenth century America. But it is, yeah, it's this story, you're right, Sorry, I'm going on this long ass tangent about it. But like it's this story where you're like, oh, the bidens is like the anti
Catholic in anti Irish stuff was real. That is an impression that people faced in America, And I wish more Irish Americans of previous generations had been like and therefore we should throw down with other oppressed people, right.
It's what we're I guess the whole of this story about mother Jones is kind of about the politic coutility of narrative. I guess, yeah, totally that way. And she's like one of the stories we tell.
Worth Yeah, and she does good with this story, Like there's really good stuff that she's going to do in her life and career. But to finish your narrative of living in Memphis, she had four kids there? Or did she? I God, if this would be the darkest part of the story if this is not true, and it's probably true, she had four children, Catherine, Elizabeth, Terrence, and Mary while living in Memphis. After the war, owners went on the
attack against the unions. Wages were rolled back, founderies shut down, three quarters of the Iron Molders were unemployed, and membership in the union fell and then a real tragedy struck, which was that ADS came and interrupted the story and just were like, ah, look at me, take Latin classes because we're sponsored by big Latin Magnus Latinous. I clearly had a teacher who let me cheat. That's how I passed Latin, never learned anything.
I would be happy if they taught me to read a room.
And here's ads and we're back. So then tragedy after tragedy. Not only did the ADS come in the middle of it, and not only the real tragedy actually, according to my dog, is that I'm not currently taking him outside, but that is just something he's going to have to deal with. Also, the eighteen sixty seven yellow fever hit Old timey disease hit Memphis hard in eighteen sixty seven. The Pinch, in particular, was in a swampy area and mosquitoes with yellow fever
came and just fucked people up. The rich people got the fuck out of town, and the poor people died, especially immigrants and Northerners died actually because they hadn't developed any immunity to yellow fever, and so it was called the strangers disease because it was blamed on immigrants, and it mostly hit immigrants.
I'm understanding that people didn't know it came about because.
Right, it was the early nineteenth century before they figured out it was mosquitoes, and yeah, if you get yellow fever, you puke up black bile and then die, I mean sometimes die, but it's not good. They actually tried to assume it was airborne, and so they all wore masks and shit, because they're smarter than modern anyway.
My asthma theory, yeah.
Which sometimes, Yeah, if people were treating COVID that way, we'd be in a better position. They would burn the bedclothes of the dead. They also burned barrels of tar in the streets to clean the air, to like disinfect the air, and eventually they figured out a mosquito borne but that's decades and decades later. And then one by one, her kids and then her husband died of yellow fever all in eighteen sixty seven. Oh god, And so she escaped famine cork and then watched everyone die in Memphis.
And she's like been through a war. She's now thirty years old and a widow, and all of her children are dead before her, and she would never have any more. There's like a version of her story where she just like changes the way she interacts with reality based on the level of grief that she's experienced. You know, I was going.
To say I would I'd kind of want them to be a better story. Was that I'd wanted to not end there and to have meaning I could instrumentalize somehow. Yeah, people reacting all kinds of very strange ways to that kind of sisting.
Yeah, well, don't worry. Something else really bad's about to happen. First, the Union paid for her husband's funeral. Once her family was gone, she went and nursed those still suffering with the disease, and then she packed up and moved back to Chicago. She got back into dressmaking, and she opened a shop alongside a business partner who's never named, and her acients were the rich of the Gilded Age. I
find this very convenient. She stood at the intersection of the rich in their fancy houses and the poor who lived without homes, and she, like the poorest half of the city, had less than one percent of its wealth at that time in Chicago. But Mother Jones was not born for an easy life. And one thing we absolutely know did happen is that on October eighth, eighteen seventy one, four years after she lost her entire family, the entire city of Chicago burned to the ground.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's the Great Chicago Fire.
I just learned this the other day. Apparently it's called the second city because of the fire. Oh shit, rebuild the entire city.
It's not the second city in America. It's the second time they built Chicago.
Yeah. See, I always thought it was because it wasn't New York. I was like, oh, well, New York must be the first city like Chicago's. Yes, it's because they had to rebuild the whole thing after the fire.
Jesus.
Oh yeah.
Chicago had been a boomtown. It was hastily constructed out of wood, and then it went up in flames. Seventeen thousand buildings were destroyed. It did two hundred million dollars in property damages. I was like when I first read that, I was like, oh, that's got to be adjusted to modern No, no, it's not adjusted to modern. Adjusted it
as seven point five billion dollars roughly right. Only about three hundred people died, which is honestly one hundred thousand people lost their homes and only three hundred people died is the best case scenario.
I wonder how that happened. I bet they've made a TV. Yeah, there's I can find. I can find it out the way I find out all American history from the tennis chipmunks.
So one of the chip marks.
And Darkwing Duck helped.
There was a barn inside the city. This is like the whatever, at least is what in the book I most recently read about this. I actually don't remember what other people have said. The cow kicked over a lantern. And this is a kind of a way to blame the Irish right because it's like an Irish lady with a barn, you know, and yeah, burned out Chicago. I think that if your entire city can be burned down because a cow kicks over a lantern, it's not the cow's fault or the lantern owner's fault.
If you make people work past the hours of darkness in a pre electric age, you're going to get a lot more fires in working class areas.
That's true.
That's why most of the big fires I think start that way. Citation needed that the Second Great Fire of London started around spittlefields and a baker's.
I didn't know about the first grade fire of London. I didn't learn any UK London's burnt down loads. Okay, that makes sense. It's been around a lot longer than most American cities. Mary Jones loses her home and shop, and she stood like everyone else on the shoreline as everything she owned burned. And then she joined the labor movement. Except she's lying again, so we don't know. She wants you to know that she immediately joined the Knights of Labor.
The Knights of Labor didn't organize in Chicago until several years later, and didn't let women in at all until eighteen eighty, so she is exaggerating her entry into it by about nine years at least, probably more like fifteen years. This is a fid Yes, she joined the Knights of Labor in the mid eighteen eighties, and she recalls her time with them as the glory days. She wrote, those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor.
Those were the days where we had no hauls, where there was no high salaried officers, no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of martyrs and the Saints. I would like her so much if she was telling the truth about anything. This is why I'm so mad. Like she is a kid, she's a fucking goth Irish Catholic who wants to throw it down hard for labor and keeps wishing she was dead.
But what you just said could be the lyrics of exfrent residence.
Yeah, yeah, totally yeah yeah, and uh, you know, she writes herself into the history of the railroad strike of eighteen seventy seven and the Haymarket affair of eighteen eighty six, and she like bases her cred when she enters the movement on these things. Right, there's no she's lying.
You're saying that this was just entiny.
There's no reason to believe it's true. I'll tell you that, right. Shit was really bad for the working class in the US in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. It's kind of always is. There was a depression in eighteen seventy three. Unionism fell from three hundred thousand to fifty thousand members because workers were desperate for work and weren't willing to gamble their jobs on strikes and shit like that. But people still have their breaking point. There's a certain amount
that they can't be pushed past. In July eighteen seventy seven, when railroads cut wages by ten percent, the folks in Martinsburg, Better Virginia, was like fuck all this and walked off the job. President Hayes sent federal troops to put down the insurrection. Okay, there's this thing that happens when I talk about labor history that people don't want to talk about.
Right.
People are like, well, why the cops come and shoot the workers. That's like, fucked up. They're just not working, And there's a little bit of shooting people for not working. Part of striking is preventing scabs from working. Part of striking it is not legal to beat someone up for scabbing. It is part of union work, and it has always been part of union work, and no one wants to talk about it. It doesn't justify bringing in federal troops to shoot people, but like, to go on strike is
sometimes a violent affair. You were defending your class and your own job by preventing someone to come in and taking it, and it doesn't work within them whatever. I read like way too much about the philosophy of like looking at society through a capitalist lens or from a like producer's lens and whatever beside the points lens. Yeah, totally. The Knights of Labor were like more interesting than I thought.
I usually see them as this very like moderate, kind of boring union with a name that they don't deserve because it's a kind of cool name, although most people say it sounds kind of sketchy, but whatever. I like Knights, and even though they historically just do bad things, but they were like into this like concept of the producers
deserve the products of their labor. You know. They were like an older form of socialists essentially versus the like later nineteenth century more Marxist style of socialists that are going to come up more anyway. In Pittsburgh, people threw down hard on July nineteenth, Folk shut down the train yards, and twenty protesters were killed by the bayonets and bullets of cops. The way it was phrased is that like people didn't like being threat with bayonets, so they threw
rocks at cops, so then the cops shot them. But the crowd routed the soldiers and then tore up track and set fire to trains and cars, and then it spread across. When I say the entire country, I mean from Pittsburgh to Chicago, because that was the entire country. Mother Jones said, quote, I showed up in Pittsburgh, they told me to come. That might have been a paraphrase. I can't remember, because, like, if she said it, she probably was like, the boys told me to come, right,
because she's always talking about her boys. You know, she did not go to Pittsburgh. Her account about the whole thing is very impersonal. She's like just basically saying what was in the newspapers. And also the railroads were shut down, so it it's hard to travel.
Ah, good point. Yeah, yeah, it's a very good point.
She probably saw what happened in Chicago where thirty more people were gunned down. It's like, you don't have to lie you were in a city where thirty people were shot for striking. You don't even have to have been at the strikes for that to affect you. You know.
It's like I thought of this the first time. You said, you don't have to lie. The oddest thing on the cheap airline that gets you through Iceland. They advertised, like did you know that ninety percent of Icelandic people believe in fairies like that, and you look into it and you ask people because it's important in Iceland, and it's like it's actually in about thirty percent, which is enough.
To be cool.
That's a lot of people to believe that fairies and elves are real.
Yeah, that's a lot of people.
Yeah, that's the significant things like, oh, it's only thirty percent. Yeah, you're still telling me you're a spooky witch Paton.
Yeah, like you're fine. It's cool. Like because also when you get to like ninety percent, you start being like, how do they exist in the modern world, where when it's like thirty percent, you're like, oh, yeah, they probably like get some shit done, you know.
Yeah, yeah, that's enough people to run those yah.
Yeah exactly. So in total, in the eighteen seventy seven strike, over the course of two weeks, one hundred thousand people struck. One hundred people were killed by the state and by right wing militias. It was a big deal and Mary Mother Jones turned forty that year. And we've covered this before on the show, but basically mainstream unions responded to this eighteen seventy seven strike by becoming more liberal and
non confrontational. They were like, WHOA, wasn't that crazy? Don't we all want to like just like not strike but
just instead like use reform. The working class overall had the exact opposite idea, and so when anarchists came to the forefront of the American labor movement at this point, it was spurred on by immigrant labors, especially Germans, and there was a whole kerfuffle called the Haymarket Affair that we covered on the very first episode of this show, where there was a massive general strike in eighteen eighty
six to fight for the eight hour workday. The cops fired into a crowd in Chicago, so anarchists called for a rally the next day, so the cops showed up to bust heads. So a German anarchists threw a bomb at the cops, So cops shot into the crowd and also shot each other in an awful lot. The forensic reports on that are like pretty much like yeah, they would pretty much go by friendly fire, which like, don't get me wrong, the anarchists shot, the cops were shooting them.
I completely full support either way. Eight anarchists were put on trial for not throwing the bomb, but just for being anarchists, and four of them were hanged, one took his own life. Three were later pardoned by a progressive governor. And this is the story of why May Day is celebrated and how Mary ended up being born that day. Retroactively, Mother Jones says that she was there. She was in
all meetings, right, you know, she's everywhere. She disagreed with the anarchist methods but liked their spirit, which is that's probably true. That is almost certainly how other Jodes feels
about the anarchists. She will consistently defend anarchists when they're being attacked by the state, and she will consistently talk shit on anarchists when they are not, and that is fair, you know, talking shit on anarchists, but stealing her valor is a popular socialist past time though, because she's like, oh, I was totally there, you know, and May first became the international working holiday across the world. The Haymarket of
Fair had a huge backlash against the anarchists. This is the first sort of red scare in America, and it fucked up labor organizing in the US. The Knights of Labor had a million members in eighteen sixty six, but
by eighteen ninety they had less than ten percent of that. Wow, and all of this, and I'm like, but I'm like, but that's just the Knights of Labor because it's like presented and the thing I read is being like, oh, I was just fucked up, right, But the Knights of Labor are like kind of the more old fashioned big union, right, there's such just one group. Yeah, And I actually whatever the history of nineteens hentry unionism as I'm slowly wrapping my head around with this, you know series.
But.
Mother Jones is still not really on the scene through all of this. She's probably around or she was doing something completely different. There's lots of ideas that have been written about in newspapers because she's incredibly famous, so she's not the only one making up stories about her.
But she is famous by this point.
Not to eighteen ninety four. Now, no one knows who she is. She this is all her backstory until the eighteen nineties. She doesn't exist to the public record. But there is one story that would be in character, and I don't quite believe it because of geography, but I don't know, which is that she got her start in the labor movement as a soapboxer out in San Francisco warning workers about the evils of Chinese immigration.
Nic and I was hoping that sentence would have a better end.
Nope. But instead it's where we're going to end today's episode, be where she even fucking exists.
The one thing we're reasonably sure she maybe might have been.
Yeah, and like it certainly would have been in character. I don't have that specific. We know about her more traveling starting in eighteen ninety four, so it's possible that this didn't happen she did later in life soapbox about the evils of Chinese immigration, don't get me wrong, But we don't know if that's how she got her start or not. She claims she got her start, you know, back in the eighteen sixties as a union wife, right, but fucking knows.
But nobody is telling this story at the time when it's happening, or allegedly.
Right, no one is talking about her until the eighteen nineties at all. Besides, census records just not a important way to prove that you matter to people. But if you want to, I don't know how to segue this to you doing plugs? You want to get some plugs?
Oh me, I want to give some plugs. Yes, well, if you are interested in my writing, you can find me on my sub steck or on the platform formerly known as Twitter. You can also buy my books from the Rainforest site or from most independent bookshop sites, and my latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I have a column book called which I should not have called bitch Doctrine because I hate I still hate saying that word out loud, because I'm British. It's a much worse word.
Then we have inversions, because there's a word that you all say all the time for about.
Yes, I'm not going to say yeah.
We all know what yah capitalism.
Americans don't like being critical of that.
You don't like saying that.
I have read many of Laurie's books, and the ones I've read are very good and you all should read them.
Thank you.
You are a subsect too, right do you already say that I do have.
A subsect and I write fiction which we can talk about.
Okay, Okay, there'll be more.
Plugs, so which does mean I like it?
That's true? Best In the end of the episode, We'll see you all on Wednesday.
Bye.
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