Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that usually is about
Speaker 1: a cool person who did cool stuff. But sometimes I
Speaker 1: start writing a script and then I find out halfway
Speaker 1: that I feel differently than I did when I started.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Giljoy, and with me today is
Speaker 1: my guest Lori Penny. Hi, Laurie, how are you?
Speaker 2: I'm all right. Thanks. You've got a huge storm here
Speaker 2: in DC where I'm recording, but now I'm great. It's
Speaker 2: really really nice to be back on the show.
Speaker 1: I'm about to have a very similar storm, probably the
Speaker 1: same storm. I'm really confused by this. I know that
Speaker 1: weather is definitely what people listen to the show to
Speaker 1: hear about, because normally weather here goes from West Virginia
Speaker 1: towards DC and not the other way. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's happening. Everything's wild. This is the
Speaker 1: most important thing that's happening this week. But also important
Speaker 1: is our producer Ian Hi.
Speaker 3: Ian Hey, Margaret, Hey, Laurie. How are you guys today?
Speaker 1: Good? We're good. People usually get to say hi to
Speaker 1: you when you're the audio engineer, but you're not the
Speaker 1: audio engineer today. The producer. Our audio engineer is Rory.
Speaker 2: No good, I'm not the audio engineer. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: am I Yeah?
Speaker 1: No, yeah, Laurie is going to be in charge of audio.
Speaker 2: Oh dear, this is going to be rapidly, rapidly descending chaos.
Speaker 1: That's just good.
Speaker 2: Mean, it's in Los Angeles where there is no weather
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 4: Ever, Oh, it's actually quite warm right now. I'm not
Speaker 4: a fan, but you know, we make do.
Speaker 2: I was told when I lived there that there were
Speaker 2: four seasons hot, real, hot, on fire, and lakers.
Speaker 4: That's hilarious and accurate. That's really good. Okay, I'm stealing that.
Speaker 3: That's good. That's good.
Speaker 1: But our audio engineer is Rory, and everyone's sahat to
Speaker 1: Rory because I'm weird about this.
Speaker 3: Hi, Rory, Rory, Rory.
Speaker 1: And our theme music was written for us by n Woman.
Speaker 1: Everyone comes to this show for the hard hitting journalism
Speaker 1: on the topics of today. So I'm here to tell
Speaker 1: you the hottest take about a woman who was born
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty seven and died almost one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: But it's going to be a pure killjoy episode. You
Speaker 1: ever heard of Mother Jones?
Speaker 2: I have, well, I've thought. I know that there was
Speaker 2: a person who inspired the magazine. Yep, a union organizer. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's about all I know.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, Ian, you heard anything about Mother Jones very vaguely.
Speaker 4: I know there's like a political YouTube channel I follow
Speaker 4: that is named Mother Jones. I'm assuming there's some relation there,
Speaker 4: but maybe not.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: They're probably related to the magazine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who that makes more sense.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'll have legal trouble with what I'm
Speaker 1: about to say.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to start.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones the person. I am not going to opine
Speaker 1: one or the other about the magazine at any point
Speaker 1: this week. Mother Jones the person was kind of a fraud.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Okay. So there's a version of Mother Jones that you
Speaker 1: can tell, you can say Mother Jones was an elderly
Speaker 1: Irish peasant woman who wore black morning gowns that she
Speaker 1: made herself. She tramped all throughout coal country with a
Speaker 1: pistol in her dress. She could out drink and out
Speaker 1: cuss the miners, and she led strike after strike. She
Speaker 1: was a woman who organized black workers alongside white ones.
Speaker 1: She involved women directly in labor struggle. She helped make
Speaker 1: the union. She was part of some of the most
Speaker 1: popular unions in the country, and she even helped found
Speaker 1: that pod favorite the Industrial Workers of the World. You
Speaker 1: could tell the story all of those things I said
Speaker 1: are technically true her. I'd also be lying. But Mother
Speaker 1: Jones can't complain if I lie, because Mother Jones lied
Speaker 1: constantly about everything.
Speaker 3: And she's also dead.
Speaker 1: So that's true. Well, she says as much. I don't
Speaker 1: trust her, trust but verify. Yeah, exactly exactly. So we'll
Speaker 1: be at the end of this, we'll be going to
Speaker 1: I think Illinois where she's buried, just to make sure
Speaker 1: she's down there.
Speaker 2: Could it be Minnesota or one of the other states
Speaker 2: that begins with them, I don't really know American geography.
Speaker 1: No it's Illinois. Yeah, no, which is near a Minnesota.
Speaker 1: There's more than one labor cemetery in Illinois, so near
Speaker 1: a Minnesota.
Speaker 2: I did not know there was a North and South Minnesota, not.
Speaker 1: A one, right, fair enough? Wait, no, we should I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get into the habit of the spirit of
Speaker 1: Mother Jones. Oh no, there's totally two Minnesota's, and I'm
Speaker 1: from which everyone.
Speaker 2: Is more radical West Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: And an enclave of revolutionary fervor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I've been there forever. I am a
Speaker 1: thousand years old, just like Mother Jones. It is kind
Speaker 1: of funny because I do constantly refer to West Virginia
Speaker 1: as the better Virginia.
Speaker 3: I always call it good Virginia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, excellent. Yeah, the one that didn't fight for
Speaker 1: slavery in exists because they didn't want to. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: You know I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, though, West Virginia split off from Virginia
Speaker 1: because they were like, well, we could fight and die
Speaker 1: over owning people, but we don't want to. And I'd
Speaker 1: like to say it's because all the white people here
Speaker 1: were like anti racist. It's because they were all poor
Speaker 1: and they didn't own enough people to be worth dying over.
Speaker 2: Also in its own way, fairness.
Speaker 1: I know, sometimes what you lack in other moral qualities
Speaker 1: you make up for by being.
Speaker 2: Poor anyway, sea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean honestly, I was gonna say, that's
Speaker 1: like kind of Mother Jones's thing too. So she lied
Speaker 1: so much much that it's almost impossible to sort out
Speaker 1: fact from fiction in her biography. But historians have done
Speaker 1: their best and This is why I know she lied
Speaker 1: so much, is because even historians who are trying to
Speaker 1: like her are like, and then she said this, that
Speaker 1: is an exaggeration, or this is not technically possible to
Speaker 1: be true.
Speaker 2: You're gonna tell me that her name wasn't really mother?
Speaker 1: Okay. I think her name probably was actually Jones, but
Speaker 1: I'm not certain. And there was another Mother Jones before her,
Speaker 1: and she stole the name.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: But I'll get to that, like no, like all the
Speaker 1: way down. She also was probably a mother at some point.
Speaker 1: I don't know, we'll get to it, Okay. There is
Speaker 1: no reason to offer the benefit of the doubt about
Speaker 1: anything we can't prove about her because she lied constantly.
Speaker 1: And I probably don't talk about this much on the show.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I hate liars just reflexively. You can't
Speaker 1: trust anything they say. If they lie about one thing,
Speaker 1: they're lying about lots of other things. Mother Jones is
Speaker 1: a messy figure by pretty much any realistic account. I
Speaker 1: spent all week looking for anyone calling her out. No
Speaker 1: one's willing to. That's why I'm here with the hard
Speaker 1: hitting journalism. Wow. Okay, By any realistic account, she is
Speaker 1: a fraud she lied about who she was, She yanked
Speaker 1: another woman's name, and she was probably grifting and did
Speaker 1: not keep track of the money she fundraised. She has
Speaker 1: been heroized and canonized sometimes kind of like literally like
Speaker 1: all of her stuff was very religious, even though she
Speaker 1: was personally agnostic. But she used very religious iconography and
Speaker 1: was quite excited when people used it to refer to her.
Speaker 2: I'm a Catholic, Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: Very much so, even though she wouldn't identify that way.
Speaker 1: But she's from a very Catholic background. In all of
Speaker 1: her way, she talks about things as very Catholic. People
Speaker 1: tell the partial story. She organized black and white workers.
Speaker 1: That much is true. She also, to the end of
Speaker 1: her days, was wildly racist who organized against Asian immigration.
Speaker 1: Didn't just talked shit on Asians and used racist terms
Speaker 1: to refer to them, but actively organized against Asian immigration
Speaker 1: into the country. She complained about Japs and Hindus stealing
Speaker 1: American jobs and also about them replacing the national character.
Speaker 3: That sounds oddly familiar.
Speaker 2: As an Irish person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, uh huh, who was an immigrant of the country, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: came over when she was fourteen or something. She organized
Speaker 1: women and got them involved in strikes. She was also
Speaker 1: opposed to women's suffrage. There were other radical women at
Speaker 1: the time who were opposed to women's suffrage because they
Speaker 1: were like voting as a distraction, right yeah, or even
Speaker 1: people who were like, oh, the suffrage movement isn't class
Speaker 1: conscious enough. It's a bunch of upper middle class white women,
Speaker 1: you know whatever.
Speaker 2: Right, Emma Goldman was pretty agnostic about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Right, right, Yeah, exactly. Emma Goldman didn't refuse to support
Speaker 1: women's suffrage because she believed that a woman's place was
Speaker 1: in the home. Mother Jones did. She supported traditional women's roles.
Speaker 1: Women belonged in the home, raising kids and cleaning and
Speaker 1: cooking for their hard working men.
Speaker 2: This was eighteen fifty something.
Speaker 1: So she's actually doing most of her work around the
Speaker 1: turn of the century, like nineteen hundred.
Speaker 2: So I was going to say, how long had this
Speaker 2: idea even been traditional for I When we think of this,
Speaker 2: you know, women should stay in the home, cooking and
Speaker 2: cleaning for the men's as some kind of ancient, ancient tradition,
Speaker 2: but it was really very much associated with the industrial
Speaker 2: revolution and that necessity of abiding labor that way. So
Speaker 2: it's like this traditional natural role, even at the tenth
Speaker 2: of the century. This was about one hundred years old. Max.
Speaker 1: That makes some sense. And actually, weirdly, she only started
Speaker 1: kind of taking that sort of role once she gets
Speaker 1: married to like an iron molder at some point. Oh right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so okay, and then the other final thing, well,
Speaker 1: I mean final thing. I'll be talking about her all week.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't as radical as she makes herself out
Speaker 1: to be. She was usually on the left side of
Speaker 1: any given union, although she was in the middle of
Speaker 1: the road unions and then on the left side of those.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely fair to say she was a socialist. But
Speaker 1: she uh before the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is
Speaker 1: the most militant labor uprising in the United States besides
Speaker 1: the one that happened in the Civil War, when black
Speaker 1: people had a general strike that won the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Before Blair Mountain, Mother Jones lied to the workers to
Speaker 1: get them to go home. She went to the governor
Speaker 1: and was like, Hey, I'll get the workers to go
Speaker 1: home instead of having an armed uprising. Don't worry. And
Speaker 1: she went to the workers and was like, I got
Speaker 1: a letter in my pocket, a telegram direct from the President.
Speaker 1: That says, if you all go home, he'll listen to
Speaker 1: your demands. And they were like, okay, let's see the telegram.
Speaker 1: And she was like, no, I don't want to. I
Speaker 1: don't want to show you goes to a different school.
Speaker 2: And she was lying, and there was no telegram.
Speaker 1: No, there was no telegram. So the miners went to war.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to like Mother Jones. When I started,
Speaker 1: I was like even kind of like, well, she wasn't
Speaker 1: really an anarchist, but she's doing all this cool stuff.
Speaker 1: She's like a goth and she's like running around and
Speaker 1: cussing and organizing.
Speaker 2: You know, goths being the most political subculture, as we
Speaker 2: all know. I'm a goth. I'm a lapsed goth. I
Speaker 2: know you're a Goth's let's be real. Let's be real.
Speaker 2: Politics aren't essential to that subculture.
Speaker 1: No, no, But she wore black morning dresses everywhere and
Speaker 1: she sewed herself. That's cool, It is cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know people who do that now, and not
Speaker 2: all of them. Not everybody who wears black morning dresses
Speaker 2: that they sow themselves is also covert or overt racist
Speaker 2: union organizer. It's not necessary. It's an esthetic first subcult. John,
Speaker 2: you can stick there if you want, and maybe you should.
Speaker 1: When I came up into the goth scene, it was
Speaker 1: like super a political exactly where I was, and so
Speaker 1: I had that impression about goths forever. And then I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, actually, goths do skew overall like Conna Lefty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, London and UK goths similar. It's aesthetic sort of
Speaker 2: politics are an offshoot of a certain kind of culture. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but there are many ways to be polyssicized by the
Speaker 2: essential feeling of being an outsider, not all of them
Speaker 2: once we might support.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fortunately that's true. So Mother Jones more or less
Speaker 1: everything we know about Mother Jones for the first fifty seven,
Speaker 1: maybe sixty years of her life come from a source
Speaker 1: that should be very reliable. Mother Jones. But she is
Speaker 1: a self made woman, and by that I mean her
Speaker 1: history has been self made, and there's very little for
Speaker 1: the first sixty years of her life that historians can confirm.
Speaker 3: That's nuts.
Speaker 4: I know, nobody ever like saw her in public or
Speaker 4: anything and wrote it down.
Speaker 3: I guess not really.
Speaker 1: Like she shows up on a couple like census records
Speaker 1: and shit, right, but she claims that she's like part
Speaker 1: of everything for years. No, she like comes onto the
Speaker 1: scene in eighteen ninety four, and so everything from before
Speaker 1: then she's just making up. Or she was a bit player.
Speaker 1: We don't know, and there's no reason to give it
Speaker 1: her the better of the doubt, right, Yeah, And this
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we should write off what she has
Speaker 1: to say about her past. It's just that we should
Speaker 1: take it with an entire shaker of salt. She was storytelling,
Speaker 1: as one of my friends puts it, very much, not
Speaker 1: one to let the truth get in the way of
Speaker 1: a good tale. Her autobiography, that she wrote near the
Speaker 1: end of her life when she was in her late eighties,
Speaker 1: is a work of fiction. It skims over her early
Speaker 1: life in just a few pages. She's got no interest
Speaker 1: in telling the story of Mary Harris as she was born,
Speaker 1: or Mary Jones as she spent her early adult life.
Speaker 1: She wants to tell you the story about Mother Jones,
Speaker 1: a persona that she became. She claims she was born
Speaker 1: in the city of Cork in Ireland in eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: on May first.
Speaker 2: My family were in Cork in the eighteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: And I was actually wondering what part of Ireland your
Speaker 1: family was from.
Speaker 2: Here cook a Bear Island, which is not in fact
Speaker 2: in Ireland. It's a peninsula just outside Cork.
Speaker 1: So it'll take the Rhode Island of Ireland. Rhode Island
Speaker 1: isn't an island. I know you don't know America.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean there's a lot wrapped up in that
Speaker 2: statement which I'm going to gloss over. But sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: Bear Island is just like Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, can't wait to go to Providence, Ireland.
Speaker 2: There's a box factory mixed boxes for other factories.
Speaker 1: Well, if you if your family was in Cork in
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty, you could make up stuff and it would
Speaker 1: be just as likely to be true, maybe more likely
Speaker 1: to be true. Then what Mother Jones has to say
Speaker 1: about I think.
Speaker 2: My No, my great grandfather was Mother Jones. Let's go
Speaker 2: with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, you can't disprove this. No, oh my god,
Speaker 1: Mother Jones is a trans woman. No, I don't want her.
Speaker 1: I don't want her.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: No, she was not born in eighteen thirty on May first.
Speaker 1: She was born in eighteen thirty seven, and we have
Speaker 1: no idea what day she was born. She was probably
Speaker 1: not born on May Day. She didn't start telling people
Speaker 1: she was born on May Day until she was in
Speaker 1: her sixties, and May Day was a labor holiday. She
Speaker 1: was most likely born in the city of Cork in
Speaker 1: County Cork in Southern Ireland, to parents who spent some
Speaker 1: of their time in the city and some of their
Speaker 1: time in a town of like twelve buildings outside the
Speaker 1: city that her mother's from. She was baptized as Mary
Speaker 1: Harris on August first, nineteen thirty seven. Her mother likely
Speaker 1: grew up in a mud wall, dirt floored hut that
Speaker 1: her family built themselves but still had to pay rent
Speaker 1: on because colonial Ireland sucks and that's what every Catholic
Speaker 1: family there at the time had to do. Mary herself
Speaker 1: probably grew up in the Catholic sums slums of the city,
Speaker 1: choked with animal shit from nearby markets. Her parents weren't literate,
Speaker 1: but she was probably from a young age. The nuns
Speaker 1: at a nearby convent who offered free education to poor girls,
Speaker 1: was like a few blocks away from where she probably lived.
Speaker 2: I believe at the time that there was a big
Speaker 2: push to educate the children, even of the working class,
Speaker 2: specifically in reading and writing in English.
Speaker 1: Okay, oh shit, yep, it's still bad education for you, but.
Speaker 2: In order to make the kids and the upcoming generations
Speaker 2: fluent in English. First, Yeah, this is one of the
Speaker 2: reasons that free education is pushed quite a lot. Citation needed,
Speaker 2: but the over that between education in English and the
Speaker 2: systematic eraser of Irish language. Yeah, it's important at that time.
Speaker 1: No, that makes sense. That was actually one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I was. I knew your family's fairly Irish.
Speaker 1: Why had you? Honestly, I guess Mother Jones would like
Speaker 1: to play up how politically turbulent the area was when
Speaker 1: she grew up, talking about seeing radicals hanging from scaffolds everywhere.
Speaker 1: This is not true. It was a tense time and place.
Speaker 1: People were rioting and early Irish labor union stuff we've
Speaker 1: covered a couple times on this show. It tended less
Speaker 1: towards like let's form a union and more like let's
Speaker 1: cross dress and kill our landlords through secret societies like
Speaker 1: the Molly Maguires and the Ribbon Men and the funnelly
Speaker 1: named White Boys. She claimed that her grandfather was hanged
Speaker 1: fighting for Irish freedom. This is not true. There's no
Speaker 1: When I first wrote this script, right, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: it seems like that might not be true. Like, no,
Speaker 1: it's just she's fucking lying about everything. It is possible
Speaker 1: people did a lot of work, found some records. That
Speaker 1: is possible that she had a great uncle or something
Speaker 1: who was shipped off for Australia for doing secret society work.
Speaker 1: Like it is possible that her family had some connections
Speaker 1: to this stuff. She tells a story about how her
Speaker 1: father escaped to America at a fishing vessel as troops
Speaker 1: looked for him, combing the city of Cork with Irish
Speaker 1: heads on the bayonets of their rifles.
Speaker 2: Hang on, they went through the whole city with heads
Speaker 2: on the top of a rifle. That seems both ludicrous and.
Speaker 1: Inefficient physically arduous.
Speaker 2: It's a thing we said we'd do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The British are like, this is our workout system.
Speaker 2: Everyone's a cost now. It's not political.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what really frustrates me about this is that
Speaker 1: you can tell the truth about colonial oppression in Ireland
Speaker 1: in the eighteen thirties, there's about to be a genocide.
Speaker 1: Right ten years later she lives through that genocide. That
Speaker 1: genocide is why her father fled. It wasn't political persecution.
Speaker 1: It was the persecution of all of the Irish people.
Speaker 1: There was no evidence of soldiers with heads on their
Speaker 1: bayonets marching through the city, and there's no evidence that
Speaker 1: her father was special. It is nearly certain that mother
Speaker 1: Jones's father went to America for the same reason. Two
Speaker 1: million other Irish folks left the island at the time
Speaker 1: that he did, which was eighteen forty seven. The Potato famine,
Speaker 1: when English starved Ireland by forcing them to try and
Speaker 1: subsist off of only potatoes in the middle of a
Speaker 1: blight and started kicking everyone out of their houses and shit.
Speaker 1: A million people starved to death and two million people left.
Speaker 2: Which is not a piece of history that is taught
Speaker 2: in British schools.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Like, what do they say about the Irish Famine?
Speaker 1: What'd you grow?
Speaker 2: They don't. No. I learned this all from a fantastic
Speaker 2: book called The Blood Never Dried, A people's history of
Speaker 2: the British Empire.
Speaker 1: That was a fucking good name.
Speaker 2: I read about ten years but no. Most history education
Speaker 2: in the UK, of which Ireland is not part. Obviously,
Speaker 2: most history education in the UK there's a lot of
Speaker 2: focus on the Tudors. We go almost up to the
Speaker 2: English Civil War, and then there's a sort of Russia,
Speaker 2: and then we sort of pick up again around World
Speaker 2: War One. Seriously, like it is very it's not only common,
Speaker 2: it's usual for British kids to study history even up
Speaker 2: to the age of eighteen and not learn a line
Speaker 2: of imperial history.
Speaker 1: That's fucking wild. Because as much as the American educational
Speaker 1: system did not teach me a proper history education, I
Speaker 1: did learn about, like some of the great evils of America,
Speaker 1: Like I learned a fair amount about slavery, you know,
Speaker 1: and some of it was even true.
Speaker 2: The impression I got was that in terms of post
Speaker 2: settler history, well, there's not as much to hell, so
Speaker 2: if you skip over certain bits, you're skipping over quite
Speaker 2: a lot of it. But the impression I got was
Speaker 2: that people might be taught different versions of what happened,
Speaker 2: but it's still mentioned. Like don't some people call it
Speaker 2: the War of Northern Aggression?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, that's when I heard. Recently, we just don't learn
Speaker 2: about the colonization of Ireland at all.
Speaker 1: But did you learn in school about how important saving
Speaker 1: money through deals and advertisements is?
Speaker 2: No? I don't know what they taught us because no
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, we're here to educate you as and the
Speaker 1: next the next AD is for Latin classes. The show
Speaker 1: is brought to you by sumus esta sunt aram aras
Speaker 1: arrant aramas aratus arrun.
Speaker 2: Iran ran.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I fucking yeah, thanks, I can conjugate
Speaker 1: one word in Latin. Wrong, here's ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: The Irish saying goes according to the history book I
Speaker 1: just read. I mean it was passed down to me
Speaker 1: by my grandmother mother Gentz. Yeah, my grandmother, your uncle,
Speaker 1: Oh that okay, huh, your great great grandfather, your great
Speaker 1: great grandfather always said God created the potato plate, but
Speaker 1: the English made the famine. So when Mary was like
Speaker 1: ten years old or so, her dad and her older
Speaker 1: brother left for Canada to work on the railroads. And
Speaker 1: this meant her older brother off to go work the railroads.
Speaker 1: He's twelve. They went aboard one of the infamous Coffin
Speaker 1: ships alongside twenty thousand other refugees, not on the same ship,
Speaker 1: but the Coffin ships had about two hundred thousand other
Speaker 1: refugees in eighteen forty seven. It's called Black forty seven.
Speaker 1: Typhus raged on the ships. The travel is five weeks long.
Speaker 1: Of those who left County Cork, one in ten died
Speaker 1: in the passage that year. Thirty percent of the survivors
Speaker 1: in Toronto died within the next year, so it is
Speaker 1: not good times coming to Canada. Dad survived, so does brother.
Speaker 1: They make their way to Burlington, Vermont, where he and
Speaker 1: his son appear on census records, so we know it happened.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones was, in her odd way, a patriot and
Speaker 1: insisted that her father was a US citizen and not Canadian.
Speaker 1: There is no reason to believe her about anything. Ever,
Speaker 1: within a few years, her father and her brother, who
Speaker 1: was twelve when he left, they had saved up enough
Speaker 1: money to get the rest of the family over and
Speaker 1: they settled in Toronto. She probably went to Catholic school
Speaker 1: and then lied and said she went to public school.
Speaker 1: Her whole vibe is so fucking Catholic, and she constantly
Speaker 1: refers to things in religious terms, but she hates the church,
Speaker 1: which is relatable, and she downplays this part of her history.
Speaker 1: She lived with her family and a few like bonus kids,
Speaker 1: like poor kids. The family was taken care of in
Speaker 1: a tiny house and they had a tiny yard with
Speaker 1: five cows, so they were actually like doing better than
Speaker 1: the average Irish family over the Catholic Irish family at
Speaker 1: the time. There was a whole bunch of Protestant Irish
Speaker 1: immigrants in Toronto at the time who outnumbered them and
Speaker 1: would get into like little ethnic wars in Toronto and
Speaker 1: go run and kill Catholics and parade around with their heads. No,
Speaker 1: you don't have to do whatever. Anyway, young Mary probably
Speaker 1: learned dressmaking, and when she was twenty she started getting
Speaker 1: a teaching certificate at the Toronto Normal School, which was
Speaker 1: a state run school. Yeah, totally. It's a very normal thing.
Speaker 2: The ones where they don't teach macket.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, the antiog warts.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: That's why she didn't last.
Speaker 2: Door to the Xavier Academy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she didn't last because it wasn't the Xavier Academy
Speaker 1: and it was a state run school to teach teachers,
Speaker 1: and it was free and students got their tuition paid
Speaker 1: for plus books a stipend. So it's actually a pretty
Speaker 1: cool system that they set up. But she was the
Speaker 1: only Catholic woman's student in the entire school, and she
Speaker 1: didn't last. There's only one other Irish Catholic period, and
Speaker 1: I think people probably made fun of her, and shit,
Speaker 1: I don't know. At twenty three, she left home for
Speaker 1: Michigan to take a teaching job at a convent. She
Speaker 1: doesn't talk about this much. And now she's off to
Speaker 1: live in a third country, the one that she eventually
Speaker 1: becomes Mother Jones in America. And for this next huge
Speaker 1: chunk of her life, we have only her own story
Speaker 1: to go on, which means I don't believe it, but whatever,
Speaker 1: I'll tell it because it's the story of Mother Jones,
Speaker 1: and I'll just be really cynical the whole time. And
Speaker 1: this is basically a behind the Bastards episode that I got.
Speaker 1: I started recording, and I like the middle of Tuesday,
Speaker 1: I was like, shit, I'm locked into this subject.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've gone so far, we can't go back now.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I understand that the behind cool people who did cool
Speaker 2: stuff is that these people are so good and possibly
Speaker 2: even nice, but like being this much of a fabulous there,
Speaker 2: there's some there's kind of a flex there.
Speaker 1: That's true, that's true. I honestly I was ready to
Speaker 1: have her. I made up my whole backstory be okay
Speaker 1: when she was a super radical who like did all
Speaker 1: this like anti racist organizing and like you know, uh,
Speaker 1: like led workers into militant struggle. Finding out she also
Speaker 1: like was an anti immigration racist and oh was she yeah?
Speaker 1: Or yeah she lied about that. No, I think that's
Speaker 1: the one thing I can trust her about. And also
Speaker 1: that like two hundred pages into a biography of her,
Speaker 1: I find out she's probably pocketing all the money she found.
Speaker 3: Racists did just keep on coming.
Speaker 1: And at that point I'm like, nah, you're a fraud.
Speaker 1: But but she also does interesting stuff. She is interesting.
Speaker 1: She's an interesting self made mythological figure in American history.
Speaker 1: It's like if Paul Bunyan was a guy who made himself.
Speaker 2: Up as a trounding guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So she winds up in Michigan. She's a secular teacher.
Speaker 1: She gets paid eight dollars a month. That is all
Speaker 1: of three hundred and three dollars a month today people
Speaker 1: are not getting paid well. In the eighteen fifties, she
Speaker 1: lasts less than a year before she went off to
Speaker 1: Chicago to become a dressmaker and then wanderlust is still honor.
Speaker 1: So she went off to Memphis, Tennessee to teach again.
Speaker 1: Where she married a white man named George Jones in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty. He was a union man, an iron molder,
Speaker 1: and this is one of the better paid skilled labor
Speaker 1: jobs available to the urban working class. Tennessee is an
Speaker 1: interesting place to move to in eighteen sixty because although
Speaker 1: you probably learn more about the American Civil War than
Speaker 1: you did about the Irish Famine in your public schools, Yeah, because.
Speaker 2: The American Civil War is covered in its own small
Speaker 2: way by the chipmunks. Do America no, for real? That's
Speaker 2: how I learned about things like the Pilgrims.
Speaker 1: I would assume that it would be like they just
Speaker 1: teach you about it because y'all got rid of slavery
Speaker 1: decades before us, and so you could just like flex
Speaker 1: on us.
Speaker 2: Did do that. I actually did some reathing into that recently,
Speaker 2: just like primed for Like, wait, I'm sure we didn't
Speaker 2: do this. I'm having read a lot of other history.
Speaker 1: But no, No, America was a uniquely slave empire.
Speaker 2: There were some people who were really genuinely driven simply
Speaker 2: by morality, including a lot of working class people who
Speaker 2: just really didn't have much contact with the reality of
Speaker 2: empire whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, anyway, that's no, no, it's okay.
Speaker 2: It's suppression, not the heroes in almost any of the stories,
Speaker 2: as is writ and proper.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 1: But what's really funny is when compared to America around slavery,
Speaker 1: they usually show up as they good guys. We've done
Speaker 1: a couple where the British show up in like armed
Speaker 1: slaver vaults and shit. But Tennessee is in the South
Speaker 1: and eighteen sixty is the year before the Chipmunks kick
Speaker 1: off the Civil War.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, it's amazing how long they lasted after
Speaker 2: the original founding fathers Alvin Simon and theater right, yeah,
Speaker 2: these were the sons of those chips right exactly.
Speaker 1: And so in Memphis, Tennessee, the fam and Irish were
Speaker 1: the only workers cheap enough to hire to compete with
Speaker 1: unfree labor, and so the Irish lived in a neighborhood
Speaker 1: called Pinch short for pinch Gut, which was called that
Speaker 1: because everyone's so skinny. They're starving or they're starving so
Speaker 1: they're skinny. And it is mostly free black and Irish
Speaker 1: folks living in the Pinch, and spoiler alert, the Irish
Speaker 1: immigrants were some of the most anti black racists in
Speaker 1: US history because the Irish were like the next up
Speaker 1: up the racial hierarchy. They were above black folks, so
Speaker 1: they had something to prove. And I promised up top
Speaker 1: that mother Jones was racist. But to make it clear,
Speaker 1: she is in one hundred percent pro black and tried
Speaker 1: very hard to fight against anti black racism. She was
Speaker 1: racist against Asian people. Her husband, George Jones. First of all, okay,
Speaker 1: there's a part of me that thinks he was never
Speaker 1: even fucking married. I don't know, Like.
Speaker 3: George Jones sounds pretty fake. I'm not gonna it does.
Speaker 2: So does marriage.
Speaker 1: And then but it's really intense about it. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: get to what's intense about it in a minute, but
Speaker 1: just sit with the fact that I have no idea
Speaker 1: if this man's real. It probably is. There's probably even
Speaker 1: a census thing on it. I didn't find the like
Speaker 1: no historian I was reading specifically, It was like, here's
Speaker 1: the census records on George S. Jones. But George Jones,
Speaker 1: the totally real man, was in the International Iron Molders Union,
Speaker 1: which is at the time the strongest union in Civil
Speaker 1: War America. War caused inflation, which caused the rich to
Speaker 1: get richer. So have skilled laborers who built the engines
Speaker 1: of war fought for their rights. But I regularly on
Speaker 1: the show end up talking about the fact that nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and unionism in the US was it is more
Speaker 1: accurate to call them white supremacist organizations and labor organizations,
Speaker 1: and the iron Molders were no different or better. One
Speaker 1: of the earliest strikes by the iron workers was in Richmond,
Speaker 1: Virginia in eighteen forty seven when white workers refused to
Speaker 1: train black workers, and so they went on drake in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty Yeah, because they refuse to train black people.
Speaker 1: They were like, you're trying to make me train black people.
Speaker 1: I won't do it.
Speaker 2: This is in bad Virginia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bad Virginia, which is actually at the time all Virginia,
Speaker 1: because it has the split hasn't happened, but it is
Speaker 1: still in Richmond, Virginia's in bad Virginia. In eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: Iron Molders called for all workers in the US to
Speaker 1: support the preservation of the union and the status quo
Speaker 1: and to fight explicitly against abolition because the slaves will
Speaker 1: steal all our jobs if we freedom. This sucks and
Speaker 1: this is credit where it's due a break between the
Speaker 1: American labor movement and the labor movement of Europe. The
Speaker 1: rest of the world, at least Europe looks at the
Speaker 1: US and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: where for the emancipation of the working class that includes
Speaker 1: the black people who don't get paid because the US
Speaker 1: labor movement has always been built a little different. But okay,
Speaker 1: also credit words due. After the war, the Iron Molders
Speaker 1: looked at the situation and decided to organize across racial lines,
Speaker 1: and therefore were maybe one of the first unions in
Speaker 1: the US to do so. Many of them were themselves racist,
Speaker 1: but when they formed the National Labor Union, they insisted
Speaker 1: that black people, women, and immigrants be allowed to join
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't compete for jobs, which is the actual
Speaker 1: right way to handle that.
Speaker 4: What is it?
Speaker 2: Persila Lagwin says, I don't know if you've ever read
Speaker 2: The Telling.
Speaker 1: I haven't.
Speaker 2: It's Oh my goodness, it's my favorite book in the
Speaker 2: Hainish cycle. And the characters in this book talk about heroism,
Speaker 2: and it turns out in the language that is being
Speaker 2: translated from the story of the Telling on this planet
Speaker 2: there's no concept of heroism. The closest word they can
Speaker 2: get to means somebody who has made amends for a
Speaker 2: great role.
Speaker 1: That's cool. I always loved the Gwin's so good. I
Speaker 1: should just do her as an episode. When do I
Speaker 1: find something bad? Oh no, I'd be crushed.
Speaker 2: No you can't, you can't. I think that.
Speaker 1: I know. I know. It's like when you have like
Speaker 1: a rash or something that's never happens to me. I
Speaker 1: don't get rashes. I'm not gross. But you have someone
Speaker 1: else google it so that you don't like think you
Speaker 1: have cancer.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, I have done this speed.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's true.
Speaker 2: You understand that this is the thing that's happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so maybe yeah, maybe I'll have to check
Speaker 1: things out. Yeah there's some like sketchy stuff around her dad,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to get into that. It's a
Speaker 1: total tangent. He's an anthropologist who kept a guy from
Speaker 1: another race as a like look at this guy like
Speaker 1: it was like from a tribe that hadn't had contact
Speaker 1: with Western civilization or whatever. Anyway, that's not like Gwen's fault.
Speaker 1: So and nor is this about LeGuin is about Mother
Speaker 1: Jones and we don't know what mother Jones is doing
Speaker 1: during the war. I know what she said was that
Speaker 1: her and her husband were quietly pro union and anti slavery,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't exactly a safe thing to be vocal
Speaker 1: about because Memphis was like in the fighting, right, Like.
Speaker 2: There were people running down the streets of Memphis with
Speaker 2: heads on the ends of their bank.
Speaker 1: But this is more likely to be true in this case,
Speaker 1: but still probably not. Yeah, exactly, So she's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, we were quietly pro union, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: I actually probably believe her about this, but she has
Speaker 1: earned zero benefit of the doubt. Her husband wasn't a
Speaker 1: white supremacist organization, although you know, again they did mend
Speaker 1: their ways. The other thing I know about Memphis and
Speaker 1: the Irish in Memphis is that shortly after Civil War,
Speaker 1: on May first, eighteen sixty six, her birth Yeah, on
Speaker 1: her birthday, the Irish went on a fucking racist rampag
Speaker 1: led by the Irish cops and firefighters at the front
Speaker 1: of the mob. They killed forty six black people, committed
Speaker 1: lots of sexual violence, and burned houses and churches and schools.
Speaker 1: And it was a Memphis guy who went on to
Speaker 1: start the fucking KKK. So right, Irish Memphis, good on
Speaker 1: you if you stood out against that.
Speaker 2: But anyway, I've been reading recently about the political history
Speaker 2: of Irish Catholics in America over the last century. And
Speaker 2: actually it was an essay about Joe Biden and about
Speaker 2: how Biden and the Kennedys, by identifying strongly as Irish Catholics,
Speaker 2: this was a way of positioning themselves as not those
Speaker 2: kind of white people, right, they have a sort of
Speaker 2: inheritance of oppression. The Irish Catholics in America are sort
Speaker 2: of positioned in the national story at that time as
Speaker 2: the bridge between sort of more trad white racism and
Speaker 2: the African American experience. And this is flying in the
Speaker 2: face of all of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, I you know, I've covered a lot of
Speaker 1: like nineteenth century Irish Americans on this show, and usually
Speaker 1: they're kind of overall. Ireland didn't send their best and
Speaker 1: specifically because of the way that race was constructed in
Speaker 1: the United States and the like offer of whiteness was
Speaker 1: made available, and because it's true that the Irish weren't white,
Speaker 1: they were not black, there was a racial hierarchy that
Speaker 1: Irish were kind of in the middle of on the
Speaker 1: Lowish end, and it was both their Irishness and their
Speaker 1: Catholicism actually distinctly Catholicism was like, oh, you're loyal to
Speaker 1: the Pope instead of us. Is like the big threat
Speaker 1: of them. And then the fact that they were I
Speaker 1: think we covered this in a recent episode of this show,
Speaker 1: the fact that they were Celtic. In the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: race science version of the world put them lower on
Speaker 1: the wrung than the Germans who were Teutonic, and the
Speaker 1: Teutonic are closer to the real good white people, the
Speaker 1: Anglo Saxons, so who were.
Speaker 2: Largely wiped out by this point, actual Saxons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's like when the Nazis called themselves
Speaker 1: arian or whatever the fuck, you know, Like, race science
Speaker 1: is not science, it's some fucking storytelling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everybody in the South of England is kind of Norman,
Speaker 2: let's be anyway.
Speaker 1: So overall, the Irish were anti black in America, I
Speaker 1: think that that is a fair overall thing to say.
Speaker 1: They were very heavily involved in the Democratic Party, which
Speaker 1: was the more racist party in the nineteenth century around
Speaker 1: the Civil War, and one of the reasons they were
Speaker 1: involved in it is that the Republican Party was super
Speaker 1: Protestant and super anti Catholic, and so they were like,
Speaker 1: if we care about the working class white people, were
Speaker 1: going to be Democrats. But that means we're also going
Speaker 1: to be part of the more racist party. And you
Speaker 1: do have a difference where like the Northern Democrats were like,
Speaker 1: whereas the Southern Democrats were like, we are the fucking slavers, right,
Speaker 1: The Northern Democrats were like a little bit blurri or
Speaker 1: about all of it. It's fascinating stuff. And there also
Speaker 1: is a ton of like Irish Republicanism that like, you know,
Speaker 1: did most of the Free of Ireland, the almost Free
Speaker 1: of Ireland that happened, A lot of them had lived
Speaker 1: in America, Like a lot of them came to America
Speaker 1: for a while, and then we're like, all right, we
Speaker 1: raised some money here, let's go back and you know,
Speaker 1: shoot the British people until they go away. It's just
Speaker 1: it's messy. And there's also a ton of like there
Speaker 1: are also a ton of Irish folks who are doing
Speaker 1: really amazing work in nineteenth century America. But it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this story, you're right, Sorry, I'm going on this
Speaker 1: long ass tangent about it. But like it's this story
Speaker 1: where you're like, oh, the bidens is like the anti
Speaker 1: Catholic in anti Irish stuff was real. That is an
Speaker 1: impression that people faced in America, And I wish more
Speaker 1: Irish Americans of previous generations had been like and therefore
Speaker 1: we should throw down with other oppressed people, right.
Speaker 2: It's what we're I guess the whole of this story
Speaker 2: about mother Jones is kind of about the politic coutility
Speaker 2: of narrative. I guess, yeah, totally that way. And she's
Speaker 2: like one of the stories we tell.
Speaker 1: Worth Yeah, and she does good with this story, Like
Speaker 1: there's really good stuff that she's going to do in
Speaker 1: her life and career. But to finish your narrative of
Speaker 1: living in Memphis, she had four kids there? Or did she?
Speaker 1: I God, if this would be the darkest part of
Speaker 1: the story if this is not true, and it's probably true,
Speaker 1: she had four children, Catherine, Elizabeth, Terrence, and Mary while
Speaker 1: living in Memphis. After the war, owners went on the
Speaker 1: attack against the unions. Wages were rolled back, founderies shut down,
Speaker 1: three quarters of the Iron Molders were unemployed, and membership
Speaker 1: in the union fell and then a real tragedy struck,
Speaker 1: which was that ADS came and interrupted the story and
Speaker 1: just were like, ah, look at me, take Latin classes
Speaker 1: because we're sponsored by big Latin Magnus Latinous. I clearly
Speaker 1: had a teacher who let me cheat. That's how I
Speaker 1: passed Latin, never learned anything.
Speaker 2: I would be happy if they taught me to read
Speaker 2: a room.
Speaker 1: And here's ads and we're back. So then tragedy after tragedy.
Speaker 1: Not only did the ADS come in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: and not only the real tragedy actually, according to my dog,
Speaker 1: is that I'm not currently taking him outside, but that
Speaker 1: is just something he's going to have to deal with. Also,
Speaker 1: the eighteen sixty seven yellow fever hit Old timey disease
Speaker 1: hit Memphis hard in eighteen sixty seven. The Pinch, in particular,
Speaker 1: was in a swampy area and mosquitoes with yellow fever
Speaker 1: came and just fucked people up. The rich people got
Speaker 1: the fuck out of town, and the poor people died,
Speaker 1: especially immigrants and Northerners died actually because they hadn't developed
Speaker 1: any immunity to yellow fever, and so it was called
Speaker 1: the strangers disease because it was blamed on immigrants, and
Speaker 1: it mostly hit immigrants.
Speaker 2: I'm understanding that people didn't know it came about because.
Speaker 1: Right, it was the early nineteenth century before they figured
Speaker 1: out it was mosquitoes, and yeah, if you get yellow fever,
Speaker 1: you puke up black bile and then die, I mean
Speaker 1: sometimes die, but it's not good. They actually tried to
Speaker 1: assume it was airborne, and so they all wore masks
Speaker 1: and shit, because they're smarter than modern anyway.
Speaker 2: My asthma theory, yeah.
Speaker 1: Which sometimes, Yeah, if people were treating COVID that way,
Speaker 1: we'd be in a better position. They would burn the
Speaker 1: bedclothes of the dead. They also burned barrels of tar
Speaker 1: in the streets to clean the air, to like disinfect
Speaker 1: the air, and eventually they figured out a mosquito borne
Speaker 1: but that's decades and decades later. And then one by one,
Speaker 1: her kids and then her husband died of yellow fever
Speaker 1: all in eighteen sixty seven. Oh god, And so she
Speaker 1: escaped famine cork and then watched everyone die in Memphis.
Speaker 1: And she's like been through a war. She's now thirty
Speaker 1: years old and a widow, and all of her children
Speaker 1: are dead before her, and she would never have any more.
Speaker 1: There's like a version of her story where she just
Speaker 1: like changes the way she interacts with reality based on
Speaker 1: the level of grief that she's experienced. You know, I
Speaker 1: was going.
Speaker 2: To say I would I'd kind of want them to
Speaker 2: be a better story. Was that I'd wanted to not
Speaker 2: end there and to have meaning I could instrumentalize somehow. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people reacting all kinds of very strange ways to that
Speaker 2: kind of sisting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, don't worry. Something else really bad's about to happen. First,
Speaker 1: the Union paid for her husband's funeral. Once her family
Speaker 1: was gone, she went and nursed those still suffering with
Speaker 1: the disease, and then she packed up and moved back
Speaker 1: to Chicago. She got back into dressmaking, and she opened
Speaker 1: a shop alongside a business partner who's never named, and
Speaker 1: her acients were the rich of the Gilded Age. I
Speaker 1: find this very convenient. She stood at the intersection of
Speaker 1: the rich in their fancy houses and the poor who
Speaker 1: lived without homes, and she, like the poorest half of
Speaker 1: the city, had less than one percent of its wealth
Speaker 1: at that time in Chicago. But Mother Jones was not
Speaker 1: born for an easy life. And one thing we absolutely
Speaker 1: know did happen is that on October eighth, eighteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: four years after she lost her entire family, the entire
Speaker 1: city of Chicago burned to the ground.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the Great Chicago Fire.
Speaker 4: I just learned this the other day. Apparently it's called
Speaker 4: the second city because of the fire. Oh shit, rebuild
Speaker 4: the entire city.
Speaker 2: It's not the second city in America. It's the second
Speaker 2: time they built Chicago.
Speaker 4: Yeah. See, I always thought it was because it wasn't
Speaker 4: New York. I was like, oh, well, New York must
Speaker 4: be the first city like Chicago's. Yes, it's because they
Speaker 4: had to rebuild the whole thing after the fire.
Speaker 1: Jesus.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Chicago had been a boomtown. It was hastily constructed out
Speaker 1: of wood, and then it went up in flames. Seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand buildings were destroyed. It did two hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: in property damages. I was like when I first read that,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's got to be adjusted to
Speaker 1: modern No, no, it's not adjusted to modern. Adjusted it
Speaker 1: as seven point five billion dollars roughly right. Only about
Speaker 1: three hundred people died, which is honestly one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people lost their homes and only three hundred people died
Speaker 1: is the best case scenario.
Speaker 2: I wonder how that happened. I bet they've made a TV. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's I can find. I can find it out the
Speaker 2: way I find out all American history from the tennis chipmunks.
Speaker 1: So one of the chip marks.
Speaker 2: And Darkwing Duck helped.
Speaker 1: There was a barn inside the city. This is like
Speaker 1: the whatever, at least is what in the book I
Speaker 1: most recently read about this. I actually don't remember what
Speaker 1: other people have said. The cow kicked over a lantern.
Speaker 1: And this is a kind of a way to blame
Speaker 1: the Irish right because it's like an Irish lady with
Speaker 1: a barn, you know, and yeah, burned out Chicago. I
Speaker 1: think that if your entire city can be burned down
Speaker 1: because a cow kicks over a lantern, it's not the
Speaker 1: cow's fault or the lantern owner's fault.
Speaker 2: If you make people work past the hours of darkness
Speaker 2: in a pre electric age, you're going to get a
Speaker 2: lot more fires in working class areas.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: That's why most of the big fires I think start
Speaker 2: that way. Citation needed that the Second Great Fire of
Speaker 2: London started around spittlefields and a baker's.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about the first grade fire of London.
Speaker 1: I didn't learn any UK London's burnt down loads. Okay,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. It's been around a lot longer than
Speaker 1: most American cities. Mary Jones loses her home and shop,
Speaker 1: and she stood like everyone else on the shoreline as
Speaker 1: everything she owned burned. And then she joined the labor movement.
Speaker 1: Except she's lying again, so we don't know. She wants
Speaker 1: you to know that she immediately joined the Knights of Labor.
Speaker 1: The Knights of Labor didn't organize in Chicago until several
Speaker 1: years later, and didn't let women in at all until
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty, so she is exaggerating her entry into it
Speaker 1: by about nine years at least, probably more like fifteen years.
Speaker 1: This is a fid Yes, she joined the Knights of
Speaker 1: Labor in the mid eighteen eighties, and she recalls her
Speaker 1: time with them as the glory days. She wrote, those
Speaker 1: were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor.
Speaker 1: Those were the days where we had no hauls, where
Speaker 1: there was no high salaried officers, no feasting with the
Speaker 1: enemies of labor. Those were the days of martyrs and
Speaker 1: the Saints. I would like her so much if she
Speaker 1: was telling the truth about anything. This is why I'm
Speaker 1: so mad. Like she is a kid, she's a fucking
Speaker 1: goth Irish Catholic who wants to throw it down hard
Speaker 1: for labor and keeps wishing she was dead.
Speaker 2: But what you just said could be the lyrics of
Speaker 2: exfrent residence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally yeah yeah, and uh, you know, she
Speaker 1: writes herself into the history of the railroad strike of
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy seven and the Haymarket affair of eighteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: and she like bases her cred when she enters the
Speaker 1: movement on these things. Right, there's no she's lying.
Speaker 2: You're saying that this was just entiny.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to believe it's true. I'll tell you that, right.
Speaker 1: Shit was really bad for the working class in the
Speaker 1: US in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. It's kind
Speaker 1: of always is. There was a depression in eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: Unionism fell from three hundred thousand to fifty thousand members
Speaker 1: because workers were desperate for work and weren't willing to
Speaker 1: gamble their jobs on strikes and shit like that. But
Speaker 1: people still have their breaking point. There's a certain amount
Speaker 1: that they can't be pushed past. In July eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: when railroads cut wages by ten percent, the folks in Martinsburg,
Speaker 1: Better Virginia, was like fuck all this and walked off
Speaker 1: the job. President Hayes sent federal troops to put down
Speaker 1: the insurrection. Okay, there's this thing that happens when I
Speaker 1: talk about labor history that people don't want to talk about.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: People are like, well, why the cops come and shoot
Speaker 1: the workers. That's like, fucked up. They're just not working,
Speaker 1: And there's a little bit of shooting people for not working.
Speaker 1: Part of striking is preventing scabs from working. Part of
Speaker 1: striking it is not legal to beat someone up for scabbing.
Speaker 1: It is part of union work, and it has always
Speaker 1: been part of union work, and no one wants to
Speaker 1: talk about it. It doesn't justify bringing in federal troops
Speaker 1: to shoot people, but like, to go on strike is
Speaker 1: sometimes a violent affair. You were defending your class and
Speaker 1: your own job by preventing someone to come in and
Speaker 1: taking it, and it doesn't work within them whatever. I
Speaker 1: read like way too much about the philosophy of like
Speaker 1: looking at society through a capitalist lens or from a
Speaker 1: like producer's lens and whatever beside the points lens. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: The Knights of Labor were like more interesting than I thought.
Speaker 1: I usually see them as this very like moderate, kind
Speaker 1: of boring union with a name that they don't deserve
Speaker 1: because it's a kind of cool name, although most people
Speaker 1: say it sounds kind of sketchy, but whatever. I like Knights,
Speaker 1: and even though they historically just do bad things, but
Speaker 1: they were like into this like concept of the producers
Speaker 1: deserve the products of their labor. You know. They were
Speaker 1: like an older form of socialists essentially versus the like
Speaker 1: later nineteenth century more Marxist style of socialists that are
Speaker 1: going to come up more anyway. In Pittsburgh, people threw
Speaker 1: down hard on July nineteenth, Folk shut down the train yards,
Speaker 1: and twenty protesters were killed by the bayonets and bullets
Speaker 1: of cops. The way it was phrased is that like
Speaker 1: people didn't like being threat with bayonets, so they threw
Speaker 1: rocks at cops, so then the cops shot them. But
Speaker 1: the crowd routed the soldiers and then tore up track
Speaker 1: and set fire to trains and cars, and then it
Speaker 1: spread across. When I say the entire country, I mean
Speaker 1: from Pittsburgh to Chicago, because that was the entire country.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones said, quote, I showed up in Pittsburgh, they
Speaker 1: told me to come. That might have been a paraphrase.
Speaker 1: I can't remember, because, like, if she said it, she
Speaker 1: probably was like, the boys told me to come, right,
Speaker 1: because she's always talking about her boys. You know, she
Speaker 1: did not go to Pittsburgh. Her account about the whole
Speaker 1: thing is very impersonal. She's like just basically saying what
Speaker 1: was in the newspapers. And also the railroads were shut down,
Speaker 1: so it it's hard to travel.
Speaker 3: Ah, good point. Yeah, yeah, it's a very good point.
Speaker 1: She probably saw what happened in Chicago where thirty more
Speaker 1: people were gunned down. It's like, you don't have to
Speaker 1: lie you were in a city where thirty people were
Speaker 1: shot for striking. You don't even have to have been
Speaker 1: at the strikes for that to affect you. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like I thought of this the first time. You said,
Speaker 2: you don't have to lie. The oddest thing on the
Speaker 2: cheap airline that gets you through Iceland. They advertised, like
Speaker 2: did you know that ninety percent of Icelandic people believe
Speaker 2: in fairies like that, and you look into it and
Speaker 2: you ask people because it's important in Iceland, and it's
Speaker 2: like it's actually in about thirty percent, which is enough.
Speaker 1: To be cool.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of people to believe that fairies and
Speaker 2: elves are real.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the significant things like, oh, it's only thirty percent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're still telling me you're a spooky witch Paton.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you're fine. It's cool. Like because also when
Speaker 1: you get to like ninety percent, you start being like,
Speaker 1: how do they exist in the modern world, where when
Speaker 1: it's like thirty percent, you're like, oh, yeah, they probably
Speaker 1: like get some shit done, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's enough people to run those yah.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. So in total, in the eighteen seventy seven strike,
Speaker 1: over the course of two weeks, one hundred thousand people struck.
Speaker 1: One hundred people were killed by the state and by
Speaker 1: right wing militias. It was a big deal and Mary
Speaker 1: Mother Jones turned forty that year. And we've covered this
Speaker 1: before on the show, but basically mainstream unions responded to
Speaker 1: this eighteen seventy seven strike by becoming more liberal and
Speaker 1: non confrontational. They were like, WHOA, wasn't that crazy? Don't
Speaker 1: we all want to like just like not strike but
Speaker 1: just instead like use reform. The working class overall had
Speaker 1: the exact opposite idea, and so when anarchists came to
Speaker 1: the forefront of the American labor movement at this point,
Speaker 1: it was spurred on by immigrant labors, especially Germans, and
Speaker 1: there was a whole kerfuffle called the Haymarket Affair that
Speaker 1: we covered on the very first episode of this show,
Speaker 1: where there was a massive general strike in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: six to fight for the eight hour workday. The cops
Speaker 1: fired into a crowd in Chicago, so anarchists called for
Speaker 1: a rally the next day, so the cops showed up
Speaker 1: to bust heads. So a German anarchists threw a bomb
Speaker 1: at the cops, So cops shot into the crowd and
Speaker 1: also shot each other in an awful lot. The forensic reports
Speaker 1: on that are like pretty much like yeah, they would
Speaker 1: pretty much go by friendly fire, which like, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, the anarchists shot, the cops were shooting them.
Speaker 1: I completely full support either way. Eight anarchists were put
Speaker 1: on trial for not throwing the bomb, but just for
Speaker 1: being anarchists, and four of them were hanged, one took
Speaker 1: his own life. Three were later pardoned by a progressive governor.
Speaker 1: And this is the story of why May Day is
Speaker 1: celebrated and how Mary ended up being born that day. Retroactively,
Speaker 1: Mother Jones says that she was there. She was in
Speaker 1: all meetings, right, you know, she's everywhere. She disagreed with
Speaker 1: the anarchist methods but liked their spirit, which is that's
Speaker 1: probably true. That is almost certainly how other Jodes feels
Speaker 1: about the anarchists. She will consistently defend anarchists when they're
Speaker 1: being attacked by the state, and she will consistently talk
Speaker 1: shit on anarchists when they are not, and that is fair,
Speaker 1: you know, talking shit on anarchists, but stealing her valor
Speaker 1: is a popular socialist past time though, because she's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I was totally there, you know, and May first became
Speaker 1: the international working holiday across the world. The Haymarket of
Speaker 1: Fair had a huge backlash against the anarchists. This is
Speaker 1: the first sort of red scare in America, and it
Speaker 1: fucked up labor organizing in the US. The Knights of
Speaker 1: Labor had a million members in eighteen sixty six, but
Speaker 1: by eighteen ninety they had less than ten percent of that. Wow,
Speaker 1: and all of this, and I'm like, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: but that's just the Knights of Labor because it's like
Speaker 1: presented and the thing I read is being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I was just fucked up, right, But the Knights of
Speaker 1: Labor are like kind of the more old fashioned big union, right,
Speaker 1: there's such just one group. Yeah, And I actually whatever
Speaker 1: the history of nineteens hentry unionism as I'm slowly wrapping
Speaker 1: my head around with this, you know series.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones is still not really on the scene through
Speaker 1: all of this. She's probably around or she was doing
Speaker 1: something completely different. There's lots of ideas that have been
Speaker 1: written about in newspapers because she's incredibly famous, so she's
Speaker 1: not the only one making up stories about her.
Speaker 2: But she is famous by this point.
Speaker 1: Not to eighteen ninety four. Now, no one knows who
Speaker 1: she is. She this is all her backstory until the
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties. She doesn't exist to the public record. But
Speaker 1: there is one story that would be in character, and
Speaker 1: I don't quite believe it because of geography, but I
Speaker 1: don't know, which is that she got her start in
Speaker 1: the labor movement as a soapboxer out in San Francisco
Speaker 1: warning workers about the evils of Chinese immigration.
Speaker 2: Nic and I was hoping that sentence would have a
Speaker 2: better end.
Speaker 1: Nope. But instead it's where we're going to end today's episode,
Speaker 1: be where she even fucking exists.
Speaker 2: The one thing we're reasonably sure she maybe might have been.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like it certainly would have been in character.
Speaker 1: I don't have that specific. We know about her more
Speaker 1: traveling starting in eighteen ninety four, so it's possible that
Speaker 1: this didn't happen she did later in life soapbox about
Speaker 1: the evils of Chinese immigration, don't get me wrong, But
Speaker 1: we don't know if that's how she got her start
Speaker 1: or not. She claims she got her start, you know,
Speaker 1: back in the eighteen sixties as a union wife, right,
Speaker 1: but fucking knows.
Speaker 2: But nobody is telling this story at the time when
Speaker 2: it's happening, or allegedly.
Speaker 1: Right, no one is talking about her until the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineties at all. Besides, census records just not a important
Speaker 1: way to prove that you matter to people. But if
Speaker 1: you want to, I don't know how to segue this
Speaker 1: to you doing plugs? You want to get some plugs?
Speaker 2: Oh me, I want to give some plugs. Yes, well,
Speaker 2: if you are interested in my writing, you can find
Speaker 2: me on my sub steck or on the platform formerly
Speaker 2: known as Twitter. You can also buy my books from
Speaker 2: the Rainforest site or from most independent bookshop sites, and
Speaker 2: my latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I have a
Speaker 2: column book called which I should not have called bitch
Speaker 2: Doctrine because I hate I still hate saying that word
Speaker 2: out loud, because I'm British. It's a much worse word.
Speaker 1: Then we have inversions, because there's a word that you
Speaker 1: all say all the time for about.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm not going to say yeah.
Speaker 4: We all know what yah capitalism.
Speaker 1: Americans don't like being critical of that.
Speaker 2: You don't like saying that.
Speaker 1: I have read many of Laurie's books, and the ones
Speaker 1: I've read are very good and you all should read them.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: You are a subsect too, right do you already say
Speaker 1: that I do have.
Speaker 2: A subsect and I write fiction which we can talk about.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, there'll be more.
Speaker 2: Plugs, so which does mean I like it?
Speaker 1: That's true? Best In the end of the episode, We'll
Speaker 1: see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Bye.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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