Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that is different than most weeks because well, whatever it's called. You already listen to part one. You know why it's complicated. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Lori Penny.
Hi, Lauri, Hi, How are you doing what she is?
Look?
I think it's fair to say that she's cool.
Yeah, I have like a she's interesting.
You don't think it's cooled to tell lies?
No, I genuinely hate liars. I think it's one of the most immoral things you can do.
And yet you write fiction.
Yeah, it's called fiction when I write it, But those are lies.
You understand that that's not real.
That didn't happen, right, So, but like if I try to convince people that something that didn't happen is true, especially if I'm trying to like put them in harm's way, like hey, everyone, you should pick up guns and go fight, or you should risk your job and risk starving to death. I should tell you truth. This is something that I believe very strongly. I think that this is my least popular ethical opinion. Actually, this is the one that most of my friends get mad at me about but I hold to it.
So you're telling me that you have numerous friends who take issue with the idea that it's bad to light of people if they're going to be sent into a violent action.
Okay, So it's like more as a broader thing, might.
Mind, Are these friends real or are they just voices that surround you where you live in the woods.
Those are separate, and those are just as real as anything.
Else, right, Okay, understood, Well they're not They might not be real, but they are true in their way.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, My like general working theory is you shouldn't lie to someone you're not willing to punch, or that you wouldn't punch if you could get away with it. Right, So, if someone's exerting power over you, you should lie to them if that's the safest way out of a situation. Right, Like it's illegal to light to cops, but it would be ethical to light to cops. Right,
they're exerting power over you. And so when people lie in when they're trapped in like patriarchal relationships, or when people lie to people exerting power over them, it makes some sense. But when you lie to people who have less power than you. I think it's punching down. And I think that people make the decisions that they make in their life based on the best available information. And I think that not telling people things is totally legitimate right.
Not everyone has a right to know everything. And I'm not like trying to come like super black and white about this. I like understand why people make certain kinds of lies at various times to handle social situations in certain ways, but like, no, overall, I'm not a big fan.
I understand, but I don't agree. It's one of the reasons we get on. So you're saying that in some ways a lie is a form of violence. It's just sometimes a preferable form of violence to physical violence.
Yeah, I would. I would say it's morally comparable to violence.
I don't know. I have a different take on what violence is. Let's go ahead with the story, which may or may not be a lie.
Fair enough, But what isn't a lie unless it is a lie? Is that our producers Ian Hi, Ian, Hey, how are you you feel like pretty confident that you're you're real?
Last time I checked? But I don't know. According to this story, anything can be true so I never.
Trust but verify. We're entering an age of real, real, serious, deep fakes.
Yeah, that's true.
And Ian Johnson stands made up. I'm going to say, like George Jones.
Oh no, I said Laurie Penny to Margaret Kiljoy.
Both of us have made up our names.
That's true.
That's that's a true falsehood.
That's true. Another true non falsehood is that everyone has to say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory, Hi, Rory.
Hi Rory. You're doing a great job.
Yeah, thank you. And our theme music was written for us by n woman. And we were talking about Mother Jones, but let's talk about the first Mother Jones because it's not the Mother Jones we're talking about.
Oh all right, because she stole that name.
Yeah, I mean again, I can't prove she stole the name. I can prove there was another Mother Jones with a pretty similar vibe writing immediately before her in the same sphere, right, because ten years before Mother Jones became Mother Jones, there was missus Henry B. Jones, the wife of a coal miner who edited the Ladies Department of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal.
What Yeah, newspapers were such a thing that you could have a job where it's like, I'm the ladies department of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal that goes out to all the railroad breakmen and that Okay.
Okay, Margaret, Like, sorry, I'm a journalist. I've come through the tiniest magazines for the silliest things. That wasn't the substance of my screen. But I'm really really charmed that you.
Thought that it was uhuh wait then what is? What was the look?
It's just a very very very similar story and kind of I mean, I don't like saying bullsy, but kind of bullsy. Yeah, there's some ovaries on that, like, you know, this sounds like a good vibe. I'm going to take that. That's fine now, I liked it.
Yeah. She edited the ladies department for the Railroad Breakman Journal. She wrote for other union magazines, and folks would write to her as dear mother Jones, and she signed her articles mother Jones. She wrote God America's is Bill Different. She wrote religious leftist tradwife poetry for about six years.
Do we have any of it?
There is? Actually, yeah, there's some of it in the book that I was reading called Mother Jones by Elliot J. Gorn has some of original Mother Jones's poetry in it.
Oh my god, I love eighteen hundred socialist poetry.
Yeah, and this one's just like very like tradwife, too right. It's like very traditional. The first Mother Jones even more than the second Mother Jones very much into women's place, being as the homemaker. The strong man would do their strong man jobs while the devoted woman would take care of the home. This is how later Mother Jones presented things as well. But Mother Jones Junior, as I'm going to call her, was way more into cussing and shit
than original Mother Jones. Although it's funny, too, right, because you're like people keep talking about like, holy shit, Mother Jones would cuss. I found a couple transcripts. She says, goddamn a lot. I feel like the bar has moved on what counts is cussing.
Yeah, I think the standards are a little different now.
Yeah. And so that's her prehistory. You know, she gets this name when she is fifty seven. We first really hear about her in eighteen ninety four, and it's part of Coxy's army because in eighteen ninety four, a small business owner named Jacob Coxy was like, well, the government should make jobs for the unemployed, and people were like, yeah, that makes sense. I don't like starving to death and scrambling for work and being mistreated. So they formed up
Coxy's army and they marched to Washington. This was not a they didn't have guns and shit. This is like a marching to Washington's like a big America thing, you know.
Yeah, I've heard of some marches on Washington. The Chipmunks, I believe, march to Washington.
Oh yeah, probably with with Duck Wing.
Duck and Chippendale, the Rescue Rangers.
I was gonna say Martin Luther King Junior, but yeah, no, yeah, also Darkling duck Into Yeah.
Sorry, I don't mean to disrespect American history and that way, genuinely truly, I like, I'm too much of a paladin to be like that's that's that's But you just got to understand that most of my early understanding of American history came through the medium of nineties cartoons.
Yeah.
Same, yeah, right, it's called hegemony. Although I'm not sure that's how it's pronounced.
I think it's how it's pronounced.
Yeah it sounds right.
Oh really, yeah, I thought it might be hegemony.
Yeah, maybe Britain hegemony.
Yeah that sounds more British.
Let's just decide that that's how British pronounce it.
This is like when I tried to persuade people for a whole week. I managed to persuade people I lived with in quarantine that we called the dishwasher the bubble cupboard.
I think sometimes Lyne is funny.
I would believe it.
I went on this long thing about Lyne. I think sometimes you can like prank people, right, yeah that is really funny, because yeah, that would have worked on me.
But look, it was. It was like week three of COVID lockdown, and you know you've met British people in LA presumably, yes, Like it's amazing. All you have to do to make someone stay a little bit better is turn up and say stuff, any stuff. You just say stuff in your normal voice, and then people are pleased.
Oh yeah, we love it, we love that stuff.
For Yeah, it was pandemic. People needed something, so I just dialed it up quite a lot for a few weeks. I was happy to do it. I was happy to do it.
Service.
Yeah, you're providing a service. There was you're a central worker in.
My own way. That's where bubble Covered came from. And Trouser Beast, which I also made up. Oh that guy is a real Trouser Beasts. Just it just sounds like, yeah, there was context, but yeah, no, nobody says that about anyone. It's it's it's a falseood. It's all.
One time Laurie and I were walking through Boston and this punk who was asking for money came up and was like, Hey, do you have any money? And Laurie was like, oh no, I'm sorry I don't. And then this punk was really mad and was like fuck you and your fake accent, and Laurie is like, this is.
My real voice.
I was raised in the woods by aristocratic mice, the truth. That's why I have a lot of little jackets but no table manners anywhere.
So the Coxy's Army, one of the people who helped this Trouser Beast army was Mother Jones. And this is probably true because Okay, so they're marching on Washington and the sympathetic folks who provide resources for them along the way. So what Mother Jones figured out is that she could go a couple days ahead of them and talk up how amazing these people are and how they need your help, and raise money for them. And look, I don't know
whether or not she skimmed off the top. I do know she did not keep records of the money that she fundraised, and she would regularly use it to provide for herself and her own needs. And that also she was later kicked out of the Socialist Party for being accused of stealing money. But there's no evidence. I love that. I'm talking about this as if I'm afraid Mother Jones the person is going to sue me. Anyway. She figures
out really early on in her career. I mean she's in she's fifty seven, but she's like, oh, I'm going to go travel around people eat up this old Irish grandma thing, you know, and so I'm going to travel ahead and help fundraise money. But then someone probably not her, I don't know, bolted with all the money one time. Oh, because they had fund raised a bunch of money, and then someone bolted with the money, ah, right.
And they had to have it physically and it was somewhere and someone nicked it.
Right, Yeah, But they kept going on May Day, eighteen ninety four, a few hundred of them made it to Washington. Most of them dropped off and they were ignored, driven off by cops, and their leaders were arrested, because that's what happens when you marched to Washington in the United States. But Mother Jones found her calling and she kept it up for thirty years. She was very good at it.
Hermo was to basically be everywhere at once, sent to herself in every struggle, and build up this persona as Mother Jones and become one of the most famous people in America, not just one of the most famous labor organizers, but like just famous person. She was fucking good at organizing and getting people out, and she was like got people on strike and she got people to join unions. In April eighteen ninety four, the same time as Coxey's army was marching, the United mine Workers led a strike
of one hundred and twenty five thousand people. Alabama in particular popped off with this strike and black and white work march side by side, which rules. They were marching against convict labor, which also rules. But then even then they managed to do it where they're like their banner says the convicts must go, as if the problem is the convicts stealing their jobs.
You were so close. I know this is not a good sign.
Mother Jones showed up fresh off of Coxey's army, even before they made it to Washington. She's whatever. I'm not saying she's skipped off with the money, but I'm not saying she didn't. And she saw what interracial solidarity could do, and just black and white solidarity, but she was into it, yes, yes, and later Mexican solidarity. It's just like really specific anti Asian.
Yeah, we haven't gotten to the San Francisco party.
Yeah, Well, unless that was how she got her start, right. The organizer, Eugene Debs was arrested from that strike. He's one of the more famous labor guys in the US, and Mother Jones organized a welcome home demonstration for him, and the police tried to prevent him from speaking, and she learned one of her powers. Mother Jones told the cops that he would speaking and that was that, and the authorities were cowed and let him talk.
Woh.
It was this stint in jail that turned Debs into a socialist, and soon he was plotting a new and better world with mother Jones. He always defended her, including when all the socialists were like, but she's stealing all the money. He's like, no, she wasn't, fuck you.
They were good, good buddies. Yeah, what's the age gap there is? She like thirty years older than this guy.
I think I don't think they were historically close friends. I actually don't think she's fucking anyone. That wasn't what I wasn't playing because she hates loose women.
Oh yes, well, but like younger guys, being mentored by like angry grandma's is one of my favorite modes right now. So I was hoping it was that, But you know, there's other cool eatings.
She says she was at the big eighteen ninety six populist convention in Saint Louis and then puts herself at the center of that action. She might have been at the convention, I don't know. She tried to convince them from selling out, but then they did. The Populist party was a thing in the nineteenth century. She never got into like Marxism or other proper intellectual socialist tendencies. And I actually think this is just kind of rules about her.
Her socialism was populist. It was homegrown American and it emphasized the individual producer against big corporations.
It's the kind of socialism you can buy at a roadstand. Well maybe not buy right, people make it in their gardens, right.
And it's like not against kind of a lot of actually the Protestant work values that America was founded on, like those didn't have to go more capitalists we actually talked to in a recent episode, I remember which one about. I think I was talking about the abolitionist movement and Protestants versus Catholics and the abolitionist movement. But anyway, whatever, okay, so sorry, no, no, it's the kind of thing I
can lose myself thinking about. So she started, rather other people started, and she started selling a socialist newspaper and selling subscriptions to folks. And this newspaper was called Appeal to Reason, and it turns out to be like one of the biggest it's the biggest leftist newspaper that the US has ever seen.
Actually is her name and face on it? Are her name and her face on this paper.
Well, they cover her a lot, and this is actually how she gets famous.
Woo.
But about this like particular radicalism. The biographer Elliot J. Gorn puts it like this, homegrown American radicals were not steeped in the writings of Marx and his commentators. Their ideas were shaped by popular authors with a socialist or unionist bent, writers who sought economic transformation while preserving paradoxically American freedom, democracy, and individualism. Mary Jones felt right at
home in the heartland radicalism. And yeah, this paper it has three quarters of a million subscribers by nineteen thirteen, which probably puts it as the whitest red leftist American newspaper in history. And I think now you start getting into where she centers herself but is telling the truth. She probably kind of helped make this happens, very good at what she does, and she certainly says this, she's
the one who made it happen. She says she started everything, but the newspaper covered her widely and seems to be how she got famous. And do you know what that newspaper probably had in it?
Oh? Is it adverts for goods, services or items.
It probably had that because most radical newspapers did. Because it turns out, trying to create anti capitalist media in a capitalist society has certain complications, like the ones that you're about to hear, which are all in Latin and Rebeck. I really enjoyed when the grick a gric ali in Yeah, that's the one totally. All I remember is the word for farm. But I don't remember the word for farm.
I think it is a gricula.
Yeah, you see, I'm worldly.
And if it isn't, that will be even worse because yeah, like what was that for. I could have learnt you know, Spanish, which I don't know anyway.
Yeah, No, I genuinely think that instead of giving ninth graders the choice of languages if they're not already fluent in Spanish, I think that American teenager in.
The United States absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, that's more practical. Let's be honest.
Yeah, I do know French, but I could also have had, you know, German.
Yeah, well, in the UK, those are both languages that make sense to learn. Who's not a lot of need for German in the United States because we won that war.
Hell yeah, did you know? It's definitely you guys by yourselves.
No, totally, Okay. The other time that the UK like kind of comes up looking good in history is like every now and then, every now and then it like hits me that the UK, including all of its major empire that spanned the world, but there was a period where it was the only political entity. Stuff like fighting the Nazis. Yeah, that's like I gotta hear that one to them, the points for that, Yeah, And there was like.
Look, there were lots of it really wasn't inevitable. For all the dreams and reams of movies and podcasts and books that come out about World War II history, particularly in the UK, there's still so much that is under report. Oh here's something that's relevant in terms of how things are stories that we tell polddictionally. So I don't know if you heard about this, but there's a big thing about the blitz in London, about how everybody went down to the underground to shelter or the.
Working carg Yeah, socialists who came up. Sorry, please tell the story.
I told you this before.
Don't tell me the story. Tell me the story.
I tend to not know. I'm going to go back a second, Okay, So I don't know if you know, Margaret, I don't. In the Second World War, there's this whole thing about how people sheltered in the Blitz in the London underground and how all the different communities of London came together to shelter from the bombs. But did you know that this was actually not the plan originally. It
was the British Communist Party, the London Communist Party. They're ripped down the exactly, they ripped down the barriers and so working for the lass people of the East End who didn't have their own shelters flooded into the underground at Oldgate I believe it was in the Blitz of September forty one, and after that it was just open season. The gates had been blocked off because the government at the time said we can't let the British working class
go underground because they'll never come out again. But then people did go underground, and it was this big solidarity thing and they just sort of what they ran with it. This became the more politically useful story, so there we go.
Yeah. No, I mean, that is the kind of stuff that gets written out of history all the time, and then like people try and recoup it. All that kind of history all the time. So Mother Jones running this newspaper that's not in Latin. And coal was king in America at the time, and it was fairly decentralized, non monopoly industry at the time, partly because it's like in the middle of fucking it's like hard to get to the places that people are mining coal. Right. The oil
industry is like way more monopolized. The workforce was diverse, and they worked for diverse owners. When I say the workforce was diverse, I mean it was multiracial. The owners were not diverse racially. They were pretty much universally wasps. There might have been a couple Irish people in there, but whatever. Anyway, whereas the actual workforce was racially diverse, people died all the fucking time in these minds by
the tens of thousands. Cavens and methane pocket explosions or just black lung boys as young as ten worked in the mines regularly. Sometimes people younger than that, but like you know, you got wait till you're double digits before you go into that mine. Son and mining towns were super isolated and people had to shop at the company store, and it was just bad. We've covered a fuck ton
of times on this show. Mother Jones showed up with the United Mine Workers, an industrial union that was willing to affiliate with either of the two larger federations, both the Knights of Labor and the AFL. But the United Mine Workers was mostly more radical than either of those groups.
It had radicals and moderates within it, but it was like skewed, a little bit more lefty, a little more socialist, and it came out fighting and it was nearly destroyed in several nationwide strikes, only to emerge as the largest union in the country for decades. Mother Jones says it that happened because of her, and again she's not not part of that. She is perfect for this job. She can get along with workers. One miner set about her. Now we're gonna get into the like Mother Jones being
kind of cool section. She came into the mine one day and talked to us in our workplace in the vernacular of the mines. How she got in, I don't know, probably just walked in and defied anyone to stop her. When I first knew her, she was in her late middle age, a woman of medium height, very sturdily built, but not fat. She dressed Yeah, I love that people have to include. Anyway, she dressed conventionally and was not at all unusual in appearance. I think this is before
she gets into the black dresses thing. She would take a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses.
Oh there's that cousin.
Okay, absolutely, it was like why I like her?
I mean, like whatever, she's nanniog basically, I don't know who that is. By the stage Terry Pratchett reference.
Oh shit, oh fuck yeah is that one of the witches?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the jolly one.
Okay. I have read more of the Terry Pratchett cop books than the Witch books. I'm embarrassed about this.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, they were more available. People handed them to me. Anyway, back to the quote, this might have been considered a little fast in ordinary women, but the miners knew and respected her. They might think her a little queer, perhaps it was an odd kind of work for a woman in those days, but they knew she was a good soul and a friend of those who most lacked friends. When she started to speak, she could carry an audience of miners with her. Every time her voice was low
and pleasant, with great carrying power. She didn't become shrill when she got excited. Instead, her voice dropped in pitch and the intensity of it became something you could almost feel physically, which is like a good like how to be a public speaker, thing that I'd never considered before.
Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in there.
Yeah. She had a complete disregard for danger or hardship and would go in wherever she thought she was needed. And she cared no more about approval from union leaders than operators. Wherever people were in trouble, she showed up to lead the fight with tireless devotion. With all this, she was no fanatic. She had a lively sense of humor. She could tell wonderful stories, usually at the expense of some boss, and she couldn't resist the temptation to agitate,
even in a joke. And she exuded a warm friendliness and human sympathy. So this is the thing that she does very good at and changes the face of labor in the United States. She becomes what's known as a walking delegate. I think she made up this term, but it is what she did. She wandered full time. She would radicalize people and recruit people, and like it's fucking impressive.
She's like in her like seventies and eighties while she's doing this shit, and like some of these places she has to walk across creeks and shit, you know.
Yeah.
In eighteen ninety seven, the union went on strike and twenty thousand workers near Pittsburgh walked off the job. Mother Jones kept them fed, convincing farmers to donate food directly to the workers. She put on pageants and would like do things like crown a child the queen of the strikers.
That's really good. Yeah, that's a good one.
Yeah.
And she also brought women to the strikes, and this has talked up a lot in history about how she brought women out to the strikes. But one of the things that I've run across by reading about strikes in America for living for the past three years, is that I've never read about women not coming to the strikes. Women always coming to the strikes, even if the women
themselves aren't on strike, which they often are. Women show up to strikes to support their husbands and show up fighting violently in a good way and dying not in a good way. For workers' rights since always, I have not run across a counter example to this. It's still a good thing that Mother Jones did. She didn't invent it, and she absolutely, to the end of her days, was opposed to women's liberation from the home. The women's place
isn't supporting her husband. I think she kind of like is like, look, you're an equal, but this is your job, you know.
Yeah, So do you think this was strategic in any way? Like could is this her real opinion or is this part of the general thing she was doing to keep as many people on board as possible because you know, feminism's not historically popular.
Yeah, I think this is her real opinion. And as much as she has, I think she lives as Mother Jones to the degree where she doesn't really exist as much Mary Jones anymore. She's no longer no one's calling her Mary Jones. She's signing everything mother. She is this persona full time, but it is absolutely part of this persona, and I think she means it. She even sees her
own work as being mother to the working class. Right, She's like taking care of her boys, even at times when it wouldn't be politically advantageous for her to fight against women's suffrage. She does, like even like in the like nineteen tens and twenties, when like women's suffrage is like happening, she's like not fuck all that. So I like, I think she means it. I think she's like, this is the role that like we are supposed to have.
I mean, it make emotional sense if this is a person who had a husband who she maybe loved, who had four kids, and she didn't choose to walk away from that that was taken from her.
Yeah, and like her mother to the movement thing is really interesting, you know, and also like a lot of it is she's like women suffrage like a middle class movement. Fuck all those like rich bitches or whatever. But like
she seems to mean it. But I also think that you're probably right that like coming in and being like but she'll talk about socialism, you know, she'll talk about being like like later she's just an organizer for the Socialist Party, which is like not a popular thing to go around telling people to do, you know.
So I don't know, generally speaking, it's I don't know. In terms of political strategy, is often much easier to pick one unpopular thing.
Just one, yeah, that makes sense, two or three, you know, yeah, but anyway, no, no, that makes sense. And so this strike wins, the Pittsburgh strike, it wins in January eighteen ninety eight, and instead of a twenty percent pay cut, the miner's got a small raise and they won the right to organize, and within five years they literally doubled their wages and won the eight hour workday, because fucking
unionizing works amazing. This unionized soft coal country, while eastern Pennsylvania and I think West Virginia are anthracite primarily, which is hard coal, and it's like way less unionized, and I don't think there's something specific, and though coal is just a very different culture of these two ways of mining. So when the anthracite miner struck in eighteen ninety nine, mother Jones showed up and organized, and the boarding house kicked her out when they figured out who she was.
So she went to stay with some miners and then they were evicted the next day out of their company home. People seeing what happened stiffened their resolve. They're like, oh, these motherfuckers are throwing people out just for letting this old lady crash like fuck that. You know, women formed mop and broom brigades. This one's clever. I like this one. What so to shame scabs from working. There was a
twenty four to seven guard outside the mines. That would be a woman holding either a mop or a broom in one hand and a baby in the other.
Wow, fantastic.
And it was like, this baby is starving because of you, you motherfucker and mother Jones went around and sourced donations to feed everyone, and people were hungry and cold, but they won soon. She was a pay organizers. She made about five hundred dollars a year, which is about eighteen thousand dollars now, which is like, you know about what a low paid organizer makes. Now. I'm going to say
the Union was her religion. She called priests and Minister sky Pilots and talked about how you should get Yeah, you got a little piece of heaven before you die. But she still couched everything in super religious terms. It's honestly, it's kind of cool. It's very interesting.
It's also Terry Pratchett who says, well, he's talking about Lord of the Rings. He says, if you're writing a fantasy novel, and Lord of the Rings is like Mount Fuji and Japanese painting. It's like, oh, if you're not talking about it, you're standing on it. And I think for former Catholics it's the same, like you might not be talking about Catholicism, but you're standing on it.
Yeah, totally if it's not in the frame, yeah, or that its absence is a specific choice.
Yes.
So she goes around. She tells stories, and she tells how everyone's joining in the union, whether or not this is true, and how all Irish mothers love their union sons but not no scabs, and she is soon a celebrity. The United mind Workers' president said, I don't believe there is a mine worker from one end of the country
to the other who does not know her name. She also derided men as not really men if they weren't union like the essence of masculinity, that she would deride people with solidarity, and she would like regularly use a like you're gonna make me a like old lady, do this instead of you, you fucking coward, piece of shit. You're not a real man, which is like, I think.
That's funny, genderous part of the story.
Yeah, West Virginia was the impossible state to organize. It's like one of the most isolated places in the country. There's like still like not a lot of highways that go through most of West Virginia and has like the
worst conditions. Actually still there's a ton of people. Like literally, when you leave my house and you drive past a spring by the side of the road, there's always trucks lined up filling up water drugs because a ton of people who live in West Virginia all over the state don't have access to running water at home and rely on public springs.
Wow, I didn't know that, do you.
Hell yeah, I'd read about it before I moved here, and then I'm just like, oh, yeah, no, there's one of those, like you know, and the mine owners were like the most brutal in West Virginia. It was just like the hardest fucking state, right. Other organizers would go around quietly to talk to families in secret. Mother Jones held huge rallies. Like she's kind of cool at this point, right, she holds huge rallies. She travels with the Mother Jones.
Band, and I don't know even a music band.
Yeah, wow, I assume it's like you know, it's fucking eighteen nineties, early nineteen hundred, so it's probably a fucking marching band.
It would be a marching band now that we both met activists, you know, it would be a samba band. But it's the same.
You see, I would rather as the marching band. But yeah, no, not like because samba's worst music. But just when I imagine the white people traveling around us the band, we're not talking.
About samba music here, We're not talking about sumber music. We're talking about the specific samba band that comes on every left wing march. It's the same people, I'm convinced, and like it's always just a bit too loud, and you have to be like yay, yeah them, it would be them.
Yeah, totally. At one point, she was arrested for speaking in West Virginia and they offered to put her up in a hotel waiting trial, but she insisted that she go to jail with her boys, and in court, the judge called her the most dangerous woman in America. She loved that, I know, I know, and then she called the judge scab. But then she later was like, we're about the same age. We'll be hanging out in heaven when we're both dead soon.
Was she flirting with this judge?
Maybe?
I'm not sure, because like I heard one way that people talked about being like, oh, she was like basically saying I'll see you in hell. But then I like read the actual quote and I was like, no, I'll see you in heaven, you know, And I'm like, yeah, all right. I think it was like kind of a like like right now, and then Wobblei's who call everyone fellow worker, like still to this day because I guess I'm one now, but like, you know, because we're kind
of cringey, they'll like call everyone fellow worker. So at one point a bunch of Wobblis are on trial and so they're just like calling the prosecutor fellow worker the whole time.
I loved that. Yeah, that's great.
Anyway, the judge gave everyone in sixty days in jail, but suspended her sentence because she was a like old woman. She leaves West Virginia. She goes to Colorado, where the Western Federation of Miners were slightly more radical and fighting are organizing, and soon she's working to recruit people to the Socialist Party of America much like I'm trying to recruit you into buying stuff, especially medieval weapons, potatoes. What
have we been sponsored by recently on this show? Really into the medieval weapons, saying Latin classes.
And actual medieval weapons.
Yeah, why not? Like, let's just be sponsored ones, rubber ones. Both are fine, they both have their purposes.
Flails are a lot of fun.
Yeah. Well, I've been asking guests recently, like which medieval weapon would you like us to get a spot answorship from?
Like?
What what medieval weapon you here for?
Catholicism?
Now, come on a like violent instrum. I see what you did there? Uh huh uh, all right, I don't want to be sponsored by Catholicism, but I guess we are.
Yeah, let's have a Morning Star.
Okay, that's what everyone picks. They all call it a flail because it called the coolest name.
Yeah, oh, because I used to my story with radical newspaper starts working for the Morning Stuff. Still the world's only daily English language communist newspaper. Wow, Or it wasn't twenty ten.
It's intentionally named after like this is what Satan's name is? Yes, yeah, I thought so. That's how you know it's been around since is what nineteenth century or something.
I think it's at least one hundred years old.
That's cool. Well, that's who were sponsored by the Satanic Church. Here you go, We're back. And now I'm feeling bad about how I did the ad transition because the State Tang Church is an actual thing. I just mean, like both Satan and the Catholic Church. That's who were sponsored by. We just wanted to cover all our bases.
Yeah, we love them.
So besides coal miners, the main other group that she wants to organize is well, she wants to organize adults so that children don't have to work, which is a good thing to do. She does it in ways that
I'm not convinced are good. In nineteen oh three, she led the March of the Mill Children from Philly to the summer home of Roosevelt, the President, and they went on this like long march where they would stop everywhere and have these huge shows where the kids were kind of the entertainment and it was like kids who were
like missing limbs and shit from mine work. At one point they teamed up with an exotic animal guy to basically add the kids to his evening circuses like the kids were then locked in cages during the like circus while like lions are roaring and shit. And then at the end she came out and gave it talk about the evils of child labor. But it was like it wasn't free. It was people going to the circus and paying the lion guy.
Hmm.
This is basically a benefit.
It's a benefit for the circus.
Americans do this now. It's I don't know. I went as somebody's date to a like a charity jalla benefit thing, which we don't have. I think the same in the funding of like public good works is different. But like there were a lot of local kids from like a local theater, which was the thing. That benefit was full. They just made these little kids get up on stage and sing little songs about how grateful they were, and it was I didn't know what to do. It was horrible.
It was really horrible. I just I wasn't a good date at that thing. I was. It's not the place where you take someone like me as your date expecting that I'll behave.
Yeah, that's what was happening here. It seems like this is usually just presented in the like long list of amazing things Mother Jones did, and I'm like, okay, there's some theatrics, you know, she does like the theatrical stuff. Her march started out with like two hundred people. It's mostly adult too, a long for support and like helping run it. One by one they dropped out and they would say shit like I liked working sixty hour shifts in the mines better than this. I'm being treated horribly.
I'm not putting up with this shit anymore. I sleep outside. She sleeps in a hotel.
Like, fuck this, She's in her seventies.
It's true, But here's where you start seeing more of this, like she's a celebrity and she is like there's two ways to tell this story and neither one is like right or wrong. But like, h yeah, no, I get yeah. I'm like, look, a random thirty year old can sleep outside, will seven year old sleeps in a hotel. That's fine by me. But like, if the labor conditions at your labor march are so bad that everyone's leaving to go back to work for the minds, you know it's pretty bad, right, yeah, yeah,
not a good sign. Yeah, And I was thinking about as I was writing this, I was thinking about how much her lying bothered me, and I was thinking, like, I'm being too hard on her, you know, because I was reading how she would write descriptions. She wrote all these articles. Her first article she ever published actually was about the horrors of child labor, And I was like, why has it bothered me so much that she's lying about this? And then I'm like, well, because she's first
I was thinking, well, she's wolf crying, right. If she lies about everything, then there's no reason to believe her political journalism because she will say whatever is politically useful to her. And so I'm thinking that right as I'm reading this, and I'm like, yeah, but obviously she's still not lying about child Let know she was lying about child labor. In her articles about child labor, she would just exaggerate how bad it was. Constantly she would exaggerate.
You don't have to lie about child labor to present it as bad, And you don't have to lie about Iceland to make it cool. Iceland is cool and child labor is bad, and the oppression of the Irish people is real. You don't need to pretend like people were marching around with heads on spikes of bayonets.
Before fact checking. There is a like the line between rhetoric and polemic that is entirely unmoored from the reality based community, and real journalism is fuzzier. Yeah, it takes a lot to There may not have been the same assumption as I think we have now, which is good that anything appearing in a newspaper presenting itself as journalism will have been checked out.
I see that. So you're saying that, like the reader might not have the same expectation of truth.
Mm hmmmm hmm. I'm actually I'm truly not sure, but there's at least not the same expectation that somebody will have double checked this. You just have to believe mother Jones, which I guess is the is the issue.
Right, and historians have checked her and she was lying, right.
Yeah, I guess she's writing in an age where it didn't matter in the same way for the polemic to be effective if this was true or not.
But see, that's like the thing that I don't like truthiness. I don't like the idea of telling people in a exaggerated evil. I don't think that that's how you build free thinking people. Agreed, And so I dislike that she lies about child labor when you can tell the truth about child labor, because child labor is really bad and really easy to explain as bad.
And although I'm just Devil's advocating here, no devil has more than enough that because as we know, but at this time, we all know that child labor is very, very bad. But people one hundred and some years ago didn't necessarily all operate on that assumption.
So it's true. Although one of the things that she would lie about, she would lie and say that labor was the only people fighting for child labor laws and stuff like that, right, whereas by and large it was religious groups and like more like reformers who were doing that. So she's lying about like other stuff as well. But that's like kind of a like that's the sort of
lie that it's really easy to fall into. I worry all the time about what I'm like, and then the anarchist did everything right, you know, and it's like, well, no, we didn't.
The Catholic Church has never done anything good. In Mother Jones reading, she's not going to let the church.
Have that, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that her problem, the problem she presented with child labor is actually different because the church and reformers were presenting a moral issue where children should get to be children. For this reason, her argument is more economic. Oh, of course, her argument is a little bit like it's a little bit like kids are stealing the jobs.
Oh man, kids go home.
Yeah, like it's it's only a little bit like that. But she specifically ties it into an economic argument instead of a moral argument. But I mean it's not wrong, no, yeah, no, I mean, like whatever, it's the same as like, it's not the same as but it's comparable to the abolition of slavery, where it's like, you know, a lot of people are making economic arguments because they actually cared about moral arguments, but we're trying to use any argument that
they could make. But to continue onward with our journey through Mother Jones's time, she tries to go with this march of children to go see Roosevelt. She's like kind of like all the time, she's always like, oh, this President's going to like me, Like this governor is going to like me, like this may like she just kind of has this thing where she's always sort of appealing to authority or I'm looking for that because I dislike her at this point, right, whatever.
And you do not like people who want to appeal to authority. That's very much not your favorite thing at all. Right, I've met you too.
Yeah, that is a bias that I have. Yeah. So then one of the other coolest things that she's credited has having done is that she was one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, who have been on this podcast by accident like dozens of times and on purpose several times because they keep doing cool shit. They were formed in nineteen oh five and they're like the most explicitly anti racist union in American history, and
mother Jones's credit is one of the founders. Yeah, so what happened was, oh no, she showed up to the first two meetings, was kind of quiet, signed her name on the thing, and then never went to another meeting again, and then spent the rest of her time like talking shit on the IWW never a wobbly She was technically there at the beginning. Her ideology does not line up with industrial unionism by and large. Well, she's not anti
industrian unionism, but like it's not her thing. They're too violent, they're too radical. She doesn't like them, So one of the things that was in the back of my mind will like, at least she did the thing, you know, no now. Instead, in nineteen oh five, she joins the Socialist Party of America and she spent seven years advocating for people to join the Socialist Party, which largely split from the IWW because they were the Socialist Party was
like less revolutionary. They were more interists in politics and lessened to syndicalism as a means of social change. But she stayed on the outs of the Socialist Party, which makes me like her a little bit because she honestly hated how middle class they were, and she did not hide her contempt for anyone who was not working class. Right, She's like, fuck these motherfuckers. She also got in a fight with a Socialists because she was loaning hundreds of
dollars out to people all the time. Where'd she get that money? I don't know. I do know where she got the money. She fund raised it, and then is like fucking loan sharking it. She's fucking loan sharking the
Socialist Party. So she gets mad because she didn't get paid back at a timely fashion, and then she's also mad because the Socialist Party cares about things that she does not, like open borders, birth control, free love, women's suffrage, and temperance to be fair fuck temperance, fuck yeah, advocating that people weren't allowed to drink. She would also try and bribe Socialist Party officials, and they accused her of
making her fortune as a lecturer. And this is where I had gotten two hundred pages in the book before I realized she was a fucking grifter. Yeah. So she's just going around fundraising and put that shit in her pocket and occasionally feeding people. And then she looks like a fucking hero all the time. And she is a fucking fraud. But she's also a good organizer. But god, and she expressed most of her anger at other women in the socialist movement. She didn't come for the middle
class men. Nope, yep.
I mean, look, that's that's the same as right now.
I know, that's a story older than time.
Everything everybody hates about the middle class is wrapped up in themophobia.
Yeah, that's that's fair.
Look, nobody is hating on all the upper class white boys I know with their martial arts classes, But we hate yoga moms for some reason.
Oh that's a good point, yeah right, Yeah.
Like it's all gendered because women of upper class women do not have cultural power in quite the same way, and it's safe to go for them.
Yeah. And also just like I think she's I think she's kind of a pick me about being a woman, you know, m So she quits the Socialist Party and or she's run out of the Socialist Party. Oh and by the way, in nineteen oh five, she was run out of the United mind Workers. I forgot about that, God, And it was over like arguments that she later represented as being like I didn't like how not radical they were.
But then if you look back at her own statements at the time, she's like totally kissing ass of the moderates and like, to.
Be clear, like, I don't know how culturally different America was one hundred and some years ago, but it would take a look for me to be involved in running someone out who was a old lady. Yeah, totally, Like it runs an old lady out of their movement, the lady must have done.
Something quite I know, especially as someone whose whole thing is being.
Like I'm just the old lady.
Yeah, old lady I'm from Ireland, where they put their heads on spikes. And so she quits and goes back to union work. She actually rejoins the mine workers, and she does her thing. She does her unique thing. She uses fiery rhetoric to sign up workers to strike, while also lying and turning her back on any actual violence if it comes to that. In West Virginia, she gave a speech that goes really hard. They wouldn't keep their dog where they keep you, fellows. You know that you,
fellows have stood it entirely too long. It is time now to put a stop to it. We will give the governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out of cabin Creek. Here on the steps of the capitol of West Virginia. I say that if the governor won't make them go, then we shall make them go. She said, will not shell.
I don't know.
If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Actually to the Lord. You ought just to see one old woman who is not afraid of all the bloodhounds, which is word for cops. It is freedom or death, and your children will be free. We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation. And I want to say to you that the next generation will not charge us for what we have done. They will charge and condemn us for
what we have left. Undone just a good fucking speaker, YEP. At the peak of her fame, when all the media was paying attention to her, after several months dint in jail, she told the press this is my fuck her quote. She told the press, one of the most striking things to me is that gradual dying out of the American type. In fifty years, the changes in type have been almost beyond belief. The Japs are not the only Orientals to be feared. The Hindus will someday make a be a
serious menace. They are coming in large numbers now, although little has been said about them. And while she organized with Jews, she referred to them in her autobiography as lickspittle Jews who had sold out Christ Jesus.
So okay Jesus, as my family who has symothy. There's a small community of Northern Irish Jews, and I'm related to them, and it's a very strange cultural position to occupy.
Yeah, that's true. And then shortly before the Battle of Blair Mountain, the biggest labor uprising in the US since again since the Civil War. In nineteen twenty one, she was afraid that things were going too far, so she did what she always did. She lied to the workers. She went to the governor and told them she would get the workers to go home. She went and told the workers to disband, said she had a telegram from the president that if they went home, he'd address their grievances.
The crowd wanted to see the telegram. She wouldn't let them. They found out she was lying to them and stopped listening to her. And I'm not totally sure. I think that's the end of her career, kind of whoa. After she's called out as a fraud at long last, she
has a nervous breakdown and leaves the coal fields. Then she writes an autobiography that's entirely fiction in nineteen twenty five, and in it she praises the West Virginia governor extensively for like preserving free speech and like because she sucks up to authority. She moved in with some friends in Maryland, and she celebrated her fake hundredth birthday on May first, nineteen thirty and then died at the age of ninety three.
And it's impressive to die at ninety three after celebrating your hundredth birthday.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
And that's Mother Jones.
Ninety three is a long, exciting life to live anyway. Again, don't have to say you're one hundred, I know.
Yeah, ninety three is still pretty good. Yeah, just tell the truth.
Yeah, you know what, And if it was all she lied about, if she had lied about her past, yes, and that was it. Yep, fine, I don't care.
Same same I think you can. You are allowed to reinvent yourself in ways that do not harm others. I'm very, very prone that.
Yeah. Yeah, but as soon as you're fucking with the money and as soon as you're lying to the people that you're supposed to be organizing and anyway, I just like this whole time. It started off being like my working title for a while was like Mother Jones, the goth hell raiser, who I don't like as much as I thought I would, And like now it's probably mother Jones kind of a fraud, to be.
Honest, this has really got to you, It really got to me. This has really got to you. It's like, I don't know. I've been thinking as we've been talking about, like, look, I know we both made a joke about this earlier,
but look, you and me, we're both writers. Neither of us has either the name or the gender that we were assigned at birth right, And some of the this is going to sound incredibly cringed, but some of the work of being an artist of any kind, a writer or political thinker in public is a kind of self mythologization totally.
And creating a persona.
Yeah, it's creating a persona, and that can be I believe, I hope it can be morally neutral, but it kind of takes guts to do. And this is why I remember I did this podcast a year ago. I was in the middle of a huge depression and you asked me. When you ask me to you know, what have I got to plug? I was almost like, oh God, I don't know if I want people to even look at it. I wasn't ready to have that be, to do that
persona work anymore. That's been the hardest bit of it. Yeah, but when it's going well, you do, it's tender because you know, even if you're saying even if what you're saying is completely true and real, it's still leaving out and enough always it's always a little bit of a fan dance totally, And I guess, I mean, how does that make you feel about mother Jones?
I think that's like part of why if she just stuck to mythologizing herself, if she was like I was born on May one, eighteen thirty, I'd be like, okay, you know, or even oh I was involved in this or that. It gets a little sketchy. Because she's building clout off of that, and she's using clout for money, it gets a little sketchyer, but it's once she's just actually misleading people, you know, Like I don't know, I do.
You think here's a question, do you think you can use clout strategically to achieve good political ends? Because that's something it's very difficult to do right now and everything is very viable having that persona for the greater good. Let's say.
I mean it's interesting, right because it's like almost impossible to make your living as an artist if you don't have a platform, right yep. And you can't have a platform that is not based on a persona because you're always going to edit. Like, I don't think I lie about who I am, but I absolutely we don't, Like
I have specific lines. I don't talk about my romantic relationships or my family to any extensive degree on this show, right, And I think people probably notice that, or maybe they haven't. I don't know, but you know, it's like, no, they have.
I know that because because to your point, there was a party at my house with some cool young leftists and cool young trans women, and they independently started talking about you, and I mentioned that I knew you, and I think it came up as like, wait, it was Margaret dating. Nobody can work it out. Yeah, yeah, people
notice and like it's but that's like being a persona. Also, I'm telling you this because like I hope it will make you smile, and you will, but also because like that stuff has reached right.
And I think that having a platform can be useful. I think that Mother Jones, even creating celebrity and going around and being like I'm Mother Jones, can be useful. I think you do have a higher uh. I think you have to hold yourself to a higher bar. Yes, when you do that, And I think that especially when people are falking with money, I don't trust them. I have no evidence that she stole money. I have lots of I mean, she was kind of a lone sharking
and everyone accused her of stealing money. So I'm just gonna go until she did it because she's dead.
But like I think, like I think that having persona and using that strategically should it should make you a person of more integrity. And at least in my own work, I've found because I became moderately well known quite young, I like to think that I would have been that I would have been, I would have taken care to be a person of integrity without that. But I absolutely know that I've had to be a lot more rigorous,
a lot faster than I might otherwise have done. And maybe it's not the best reason, but at least it's not like mother Jon's I guess.
Yeah, or she's amazing and I'm a hater. I don't know, well, she's a racist, but lots of people have like a specific thing that they're terrible about. But like, I don't know, that's pretty.
I don't think there's an argument there. Yeah, there was no need for that.
No, she really kinda left that out and been he realized. Yeah, but people sure don't talk about that part of what she has to say, yep, because her continued persona is whatever anyway. But here we are at the end where you talk about the things that you do with your persona platform. Lori Penny, what.
Do I do with my persona platform? I write books which you can buy from independent bookshops online and in person, or you could go to the Rainforest site and you just google my name Laury Penny and they will be there. My latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I also have a substack which is just Lori Penny substack. And I'm also writing for various TV shows at the moment, which I'm not allowed to talk about, which makes them sound
possibly more exciting than they are. I think they're quite exciting.
Hell yeah, whatever show you were, you, dear listener, are excited about. Laurie is writing it.
It's not the queer historical Marx and Angels romance that we all really desperately want to see. I can tell you that because nobody will ever, ever ever let me make it.
Well, that's it for the show and we will talk to you next week. When we talk about someone who will probably I'll like them more. I like the average guest, hope no, I like the guests quite a lot, the average subject quite a lot. And I'll talk to you all next week. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Or more podcasts and fool Zone Media, visit our website fool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, app A podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.