Those were the days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers, no feasting with the enemies of labor. Or, as Mother Jones put it in the pungent style redolent of her Roman Catholic heritage: “Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor. His spirited and sympathetic biography also calls attention to an important but largely forgotten part of American history. Gorn, a professor of history at Purdue, has continued the task of filling in the blanks and sorting out fact from legend.

In 1974, Dale Fetherling offered the first comprehensive account of Jones’ life.

The lack of information about her early years has presented a challenge to her biographers.

It told almost nothing of her youth or her personal life but focused almost entirely on her public role. In 1925 (when she was 95 by her calculation, but actually a mere 88), she published her autobiography: a powerful account of her life, inaccurate in detail but truthful in its expression of her passionate beliefs. It was not until just before the turn of the century that Mary Jones, who had become active in the labor movement, began signing her letters “Mother Jones,” an identity she embraced until her death in 1930. Only six years later, Mary Jones lost her husband and all four children to yellow fever. In 1861, she married a Memphis iron molder named George Jones, with whom she had four children. Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, in 1837, a decade before her family was forced by the potato famine of 1846-48 to emigrate. Her period of greatest fame and activity was the first quarter of the 20th century, fighting for the miners of West Virginia and Colorado, revolutionaries in Mexico and child laborers everywhere. White-haired, pink-cheeked, clad in long, dark grandmotherly dresses, she braved thugs, bullets, police, judges, governors and jail. And unlike our current “legends,” who work hard to seem younger than their age, Mother Jones actually lied about her birth date in order to present herself as seven years older than she in fact was. Certainly, she was a far cry from the “legends” who now flourish by offering up “secrets” of their private lives to a public hooked on triviality. My address is like my shoes it travels with me wherever I go.” Like Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed, she made herself a legend. Asked to state her place of residence, the woman who called herself Mother Jones memorably replied: “I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly in what place, because I am always in the fight against oppression, and wherever a fight is going on I have to jump there.

Mother Jones by Elliott J. Gorn