Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that is different than
Speaker 1: most weeks because well, whatever it's called. You already listen
Speaker 1: to part one. You know why it's complicated. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Lori Penny.
Speaker 2: Hi, Lauri, Hi, How are you doing what she is?
Speaker 1: Look?
Speaker 2: I think it's fair to say that she's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have like a she's interesting.
Speaker 2: You don't think it's cooled to tell lies?
Speaker 1: No, I genuinely hate liars. I think it's one of
Speaker 1: the most immoral things you can do.
Speaker 2: And yet you write fiction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's called fiction when I write it, But those
Speaker 1: are lies.
Speaker 2: You understand that that's not real.
Speaker 1: That didn't happen, right, So, but like if I try
Speaker 1: to convince people that something that didn't happen is true,
Speaker 1: especially if I'm trying to like put them in harm's way,
Speaker 1: like hey, everyone, you should pick up guns and go fight,
Speaker 1: or you should risk your job and risk starving to death.
Speaker 1: I should tell you truth. This is something that I
Speaker 1: believe very strongly. I think that this is my least
Speaker 1: popular ethical opinion. Actually, this is the one that most
Speaker 1: of my friends get mad at me about but I
Speaker 1: hold to it.
Speaker 2: So you're telling me that you have numerous friends who
Speaker 2: take issue with the idea that it's bad to light
Speaker 2: of people if they're going to be sent into a
Speaker 2: violent action.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it's like more as a broader thing, might.
Speaker 2: Mind, Are these friends real or are they just voices
Speaker 2: that surround you where you live in the woods.
Speaker 1: Those are separate, and those are just as real as anything.
Speaker 2: Else, right, Okay, understood, Well they're not They might not
Speaker 2: be real, but they are true in their way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, My like general working theory is
Speaker 1: you shouldn't lie to someone you're not willing to punch,
Speaker 1: or that you wouldn't punch if you could get away
Speaker 1: with it. Right, So, if someone's exerting power over you,
Speaker 1: you should lie to them if that's the safest way
Speaker 1: out of a situation. Right, Like it's illegal to light
Speaker 1: to cops, but it would be ethical to light to cops. Right,
Speaker 1: they're exerting power over you. And so when people lie
Speaker 1: in when they're trapped in like patriarchal relationships, or when
Speaker 1: people lie to people exerting power over them, it makes
Speaker 1: some sense. But when you lie to people who have
Speaker 1: less power than you. I think it's punching down. And
Speaker 1: I think that people make the decisions that they make
Speaker 1: in their life based on the best available information. And
Speaker 1: I think that not telling people things is totally legitimate right.
Speaker 1: Not everyone has a right to know everything. And I'm
Speaker 1: not like trying to come like super black and white
Speaker 1: about this. I like understand why people make certain kinds
Speaker 1: of lies at various times to handle social situations in
Speaker 1: certain ways, but like, no, overall, I'm not a big fan.
Speaker 2: I understand, but I don't agree. It's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons we get on. So you're saying that in some
Speaker 2: ways a lie is a form of violence. It's just
Speaker 2: sometimes a preferable form of violence to physical violence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would. I would say it's morally comparable to violence.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I have a different take on what
Speaker 2: violence is. Let's go ahead with the story, which may
Speaker 2: or may not be a lie.
Speaker 1: Fair enough, But what isn't a lie unless it is
Speaker 1: a lie? Is that our producers Ian Hi, Ian, Hey,
Speaker 1: how are you you feel like pretty confident that you're
Speaker 1: you're real?
Speaker 3: Last time I checked? But I don't know. According to
Speaker 3: this story, anything can be true so I never.
Speaker 2: Trust but verify. We're entering an age of real, real, serious,
Speaker 2: deep fakes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: And Ian Johnson stands made up. I'm going to say,
Speaker 2: like George Jones.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I said Laurie Penny to Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 2: Both of us have made up our names.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: That's that's a true falsehood.
Speaker 1: That's true. Another true non falsehood is that everyone has
Speaker 1: to say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory, Hi, Rory.
Speaker 3: Hi Rory. You're doing a great job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. And our theme music was written for
Speaker 1: us by n woman. And we were talking about Mother Jones,
Speaker 1: but let's talk about the first Mother Jones because it's
Speaker 1: not the Mother Jones we're talking about.
Speaker 3: Oh all right, because she stole that name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean again, I can't prove she stole the name.
Speaker 1: I can prove there was another Mother Jones with a
Speaker 1: pretty similar vibe writing immediately before her in the same sphere, right,
Speaker 1: because ten years before Mother Jones became Mother Jones, there
Speaker 1: was missus Henry B. Jones, the wife of a coal
Speaker 1: miner who edited the Ladies Department of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal.
Speaker 1: What Yeah, newspapers were such a thing that you could
Speaker 1: have a job where it's like, I'm the ladies department
Speaker 1: of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal that goes out to all
Speaker 1: the railroad breakmen and that Okay.
Speaker 2: Okay, Margaret, Like, sorry, I'm a journalist. I've come through
Speaker 2: the tiniest magazines for the silliest things. That wasn't the
Speaker 2: substance of my screen. But I'm really really charmed that you.
Speaker 1: Thought that it was uhuh wait then what is? What
Speaker 1: was the look?
Speaker 2: It's just a very very very similar story and kind
Speaker 2: of I mean, I don't like saying bullsy, but kind
Speaker 2: of bullsy. Yeah, there's some ovaries on that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: this sounds like a good vibe. I'm going to take that.
Speaker 2: That's fine now, I liked it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. She edited the ladies department for the Railroad Breakman Journal.
Speaker 1: She wrote for other union magazines, and folks would write
Speaker 1: to her as dear mother Jones, and she signed her
Speaker 1: articles mother Jones. She wrote God America's is Bill Different.
Speaker 1: She wrote religious leftist tradwife poetry for about six years.
Speaker 2: Do we have any of it?
Speaker 1: There is? Actually, yeah, there's some of it in the
Speaker 1: book that I was reading called Mother Jones by Elliot J.
Speaker 1: Gorn has some of original Mother Jones's poetry in it.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I love eighteen hundred socialist poetry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this one's just like very like tradwife, too right.
Speaker 1: It's like very traditional. The first Mother Jones even more
Speaker 1: than the second Mother Jones very much into women's place,
Speaker 1: being as the homemaker. The strong man would do their
Speaker 1: strong man jobs while the devoted woman would take care
Speaker 1: of the home. This is how later Mother Jones presented
Speaker 1: things as well. But Mother Jones Junior, as I'm going
Speaker 1: to call her, was way more into cussing and shit
Speaker 1: than original Mother Jones. Although it's funny, too, right, because
Speaker 1: you're like people keep talking about like, holy shit, Mother
Speaker 1: Jones would cuss. I found a couple transcripts. She says,
Speaker 1: goddamn a lot. I feel like the bar has moved
Speaker 1: on what counts is cussing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the standards are a little different now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so that's her prehistory. You know, she gets
Speaker 1: this name when she is fifty seven. We first really
Speaker 1: hear about her in eighteen ninety four, and it's part
Speaker 1: of Coxy's army because in eighteen ninety four, a small
Speaker 1: business owner named Jacob Coxy was like, well, the government
Speaker 1: should make jobs for the unemployed, and people were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. I don't like starving to death and
Speaker 1: scrambling for work and being mistreated. So they formed up
Speaker 1: Coxy's army and they marched to Washington. This was not
Speaker 1: a they didn't have guns and shit. This is like
Speaker 1: a marching to Washington's like a big America thing, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard of some marches on Washington. The Chipmunks,
Speaker 2: I believe, march to Washington.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, probably with with Duck Wing.
Speaker 2: Duck and Chippendale, the Rescue Rangers.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say Martin Luther King Junior, but yeah, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: also Darkling duck Into Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I don't mean to disrespect American history and that way,
Speaker 2: genuinely truly, I like, I'm too much of a paladin
Speaker 2: to be like that's that's that's But you just got
Speaker 2: to understand that most of my early understanding of American
Speaker 2: history came through the medium of nineties cartoons.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Same, yeah, right, it's called hegemony. Although I'm not sure
Speaker 2: that's how it's pronounced.
Speaker 1: I think it's how it's pronounced.
Speaker 3: Yeah it sounds right.
Speaker 2: Oh really, yeah, I thought it might be hegemony.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe Britain hegemony.
Speaker 3: Yeah that sounds more British.
Speaker 1: Let's just decide that that's how British pronounce it.
Speaker 2: This is like when I tried to persuade people for
Speaker 2: a whole week. I managed to persuade people I lived
Speaker 2: with in quarantine that we called the dishwasher the bubble cupboard.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes Lyne is funny.
Speaker 3: I would believe it.
Speaker 1: I went on this long thing about Lyne. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes you can like prank people, right, yeah that is
Speaker 1: really funny, because yeah, that would have worked on me.
Speaker 2: But look, it was. It was like week three of
Speaker 2: COVID lockdown, and you know you've met British people in
Speaker 2: LA presumably, yes, Like it's amazing. All you have to
Speaker 2: do to make someone stay a little bit better is
Speaker 2: turn up and say stuff, any stuff. You just say
Speaker 2: stuff in your normal voice, and then people are pleased.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we love it, we love that stuff.
Speaker 2: For Yeah, it was pandemic. People needed something, so I
Speaker 2: just dialed it up quite a lot for a few weeks.
Speaker 2: I was happy to do it. I was happy to
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 1: Service.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're providing a service. There was you're a central
Speaker 3: worker in.
Speaker 2: My own way. That's where bubble Covered came from. And
Speaker 2: Trouser Beast, which I also made up. Oh that guy
Speaker 2: is a real Trouser Beasts. Just it just sounds like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there was context, but yeah, no, nobody says that about anyone.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's a falseood. It's all.
Speaker 1: One time Laurie and I were walking through Boston and
Speaker 1: this punk who was asking for money came up and
Speaker 1: was like, Hey, do you have any money? And Laurie
Speaker 1: was like, oh no, I'm sorry I don't. And then
Speaker 1: this punk was really mad and was like fuck you
Speaker 1: and your fake accent, and Laurie is like, this is.
Speaker 3: My real voice.
Speaker 2: I was raised in the woods by aristocratic mice, the truth.
Speaker 2: That's why I have a lot of little jackets but
Speaker 2: no table manners anywhere.
Speaker 1: So the Coxy's Army, one of the people who helped
Speaker 1: this Trouser Beast army was Mother Jones. And this is
Speaker 1: probably true because Okay, so they're marching on Washington and
Speaker 1: the sympathetic folks who provide resources for them along the way.
Speaker 1: So what Mother Jones figured out is that she could
Speaker 1: go a couple days ahead of them and talk up
Speaker 1: how amazing these people are and how they need your help,
Speaker 1: and raise money for them. And look, I don't know
Speaker 1: whether or not she skimmed off the top. I do
Speaker 1: know she did not keep records of the money that
Speaker 1: she fundraised, and she would regularly use it to provide
Speaker 1: for herself and her own needs. And that also she
Speaker 1: was later kicked out of the Socialist Party for being
Speaker 1: accused of stealing money. But there's no evidence. I love that.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about this as if I'm afraid Mother Jones
Speaker 1: the person is going to sue me. Anyway. She figures
Speaker 1: out really early on in her career. I mean she's
Speaker 1: in she's fifty seven, but she's like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to go travel around people eat up this old Irish
Speaker 1: grandma thing, you know, and so I'm going to travel
Speaker 1: ahead and help fundraise money. But then someone probably not her,
Speaker 1: I don't know, bolted with all the money one time. Oh,
Speaker 1: because they had fund raised a bunch of money, and
Speaker 1: then someone bolted with the money, ah, right.
Speaker 2: And they had to have it physically and it was
Speaker 2: somewhere and someone nicked it.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, But they kept going on May Day, eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, a few hundred of them made it to Washington.
Speaker 1: Most of them dropped off and they were ignored, driven
Speaker 1: off by cops, and their leaders were arrested, because that's
Speaker 1: what happens when you marched to Washington in the United States.
Speaker 1: But Mother Jones found her calling and she kept it
Speaker 1: up for thirty years. She was very good at it.
Speaker 1: Hermo was to basically be everywhere at once, sent to
Speaker 1: herself in every struggle, and build up this persona as
Speaker 1: Mother Jones and become one of the most famous people
Speaker 1: in America, not just one of the most famous labor organizers,
Speaker 1: but like just famous person. She was fucking good at
Speaker 1: organizing and getting people out, and she was like got
Speaker 1: people on strike and she got people to join unions.
Speaker 1: In April eighteen ninety four, the same time as Coxey's
Speaker 1: army was marching, the United mine Workers led a strike
Speaker 1: of one hundred and twenty five thousand people. Alabama in
Speaker 1: particular popped off with this strike and black and white
Speaker 1: work march side by side, which rules. They were marching
Speaker 1: against convict labor, which also rules. But then even then
Speaker 1: they managed to do it where they're like their banner
Speaker 1: says the convicts must go, as if the problem is
Speaker 1: the convicts stealing their jobs.
Speaker 2: You were so close. I know this is not a
Speaker 2: good sign.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones showed up fresh off of Coxey's army, even
Speaker 1: before they made it to Washington. She's whatever. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying she's skipped off with the money, but I'm not
Speaker 1: saying she didn't. And she saw what interracial solidarity could do,
Speaker 1: and just black and white solidarity, but she was into it, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and later Mexican solidarity. It's just like really specific anti Asian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we haven't gotten to the San Francisco party.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, unless that was how she got her start, right.
Speaker 1: The organizer, Eugene Debs was arrested from that strike. He's
Speaker 1: one of the more famous labor guys in the US,
Speaker 1: and Mother Jones organized a welcome home demonstration for him,
Speaker 1: and the police tried to prevent him from speaking, and
Speaker 1: she learned one of her powers. Mother Jones told the
Speaker 1: cops that he would speaking and that was that, and
Speaker 1: the authorities were cowed and let him talk.
Speaker 3: Woh.
Speaker 1: It was this stint in jail that turned Debs into
Speaker 1: a socialist, and soon he was plotting a new and
Speaker 1: better world with mother Jones. He always defended her, including
Speaker 1: when all the socialists were like, but she's stealing all
Speaker 1: the money. He's like, no, she wasn't, fuck you.
Speaker 2: They were good, good buddies. Yeah, what's the age gap
Speaker 2: there is? She like thirty years older than this guy.
Speaker 1: I think I don't think they were historically close friends.
Speaker 1: I actually don't think she's fucking anyone. That wasn't what
Speaker 1: I wasn't playing because she hates loose women.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, well, but like younger guys, being mentored by
Speaker 2: like angry grandma's is one of my favorite modes right now.
Speaker 2: So I was hoping it was that, But you know,
Speaker 2: there's other cool eatings.
Speaker 1: She says she was at the big eighteen ninety six
Speaker 1: populist convention in Saint Louis and then puts herself at
Speaker 1: the center of that action. She might have been at
Speaker 1: the convention, I don't know. She tried to convince them
Speaker 1: from selling out, but then they did. The Populist party
Speaker 1: was a thing in the nineteenth century. She never got
Speaker 1: into like Marxism or other proper intellectual socialist tendencies. And
Speaker 1: I actually think this is just kind of rules about her.
Speaker 1: Her socialism was populist. It was homegrown American and it
Speaker 1: emphasized the individual producer against big corporations.
Speaker 2: It's the kind of socialism you can buy at a roadstand.
Speaker 2: Well maybe not buy right, people make it in their gardens, right.
Speaker 1: And it's like not against kind of a lot of
Speaker 1: actually the Protestant work values that America was founded on,
Speaker 1: like those didn't have to go more capitalists we actually
Speaker 1: talked to in a recent episode, I remember which one about.
Speaker 1: I think I was talking about the abolitionist movement and
Speaker 1: Protestants versus Catholics and the abolitionist movement. But anyway, whatever, okay,
Speaker 1: so sorry, no, no, it's the kind of thing I
Speaker 1: can lose myself thinking about. So she started, rather other
Speaker 1: people started, and she started selling a socialist newspaper and
Speaker 1: selling subscriptions to folks. And this newspaper was called Appeal
Speaker 1: to Reason, and it turns out to be like one
Speaker 1: of the biggest it's the biggest leftist newspaper that the
Speaker 1: US has ever seen.
Speaker 2: Actually is her name and face on it? Are her
Speaker 2: name and her face on this paper.
Speaker 1: Well, they cover her a lot, and this is actually
Speaker 1: how she gets famous.
Speaker 3: Woo.
Speaker 1: But about this like particular radicalism. The biographer Elliot J.
Speaker 1: Gorn puts it like this, homegrown American radicals were not
Speaker 1: steeped in the writings of Marx and his commentators. Their
Speaker 1: ideas were shaped by popular authors with a socialist or
Speaker 1: unionist bent, writers who sought economic transformation while preserving paradoxically
Speaker 1: American freedom, democracy, and individualism. Mary Jones felt right at
Speaker 1: home in the heartland radicalism. And yeah, this paper it
Speaker 1: has three quarters of a million subscribers by nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 1: which probably puts it as the whitest red leftist American
Speaker 1: newspaper in history. And I think now you start getting
Speaker 1: into where she centers herself but is telling the truth.
Speaker 1: She probably kind of helped make this happens, very good
Speaker 1: at what she does, and she certainly says this, she's
Speaker 1: the one who made it happen. She says she started everything,
Speaker 1: but the newspaper covered her widely and seems to be
Speaker 1: how she got famous. And do you know what that
Speaker 1: newspaper probably had in it?
Speaker 2: Oh? Is it adverts for goods, services or items.
Speaker 1: It probably had that because most radical newspapers did. Because
Speaker 1: it turns out, trying to create anti capitalist media in
Speaker 1: a capitalist society has certain complications, like the ones that
Speaker 1: you're about to hear, which are all in Latin and Rebeck.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed when the grick a gric ali in Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one totally. All I remember is the word
Speaker 1: for farm. But I don't remember the word for farm.
Speaker 2: I think it is a gricula.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see, I'm worldly.
Speaker 2: And if it isn't, that will be even worse because yeah,
Speaker 2: like what was that for. I could have learnt you know, Spanish,
Speaker 2: which I don't know anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I genuinely think that instead of giving ninth
Speaker 1: graders the choice of languages if they're not already fluent
Speaker 1: in Spanish, I think that American teenager in.
Speaker 2: The United States absolutely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's more practical. Let's be honest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do know French, but I could also have had,
Speaker 2: you know, German.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, in the UK, those are both languages that
Speaker 1: make sense to learn. Who's not a lot of need
Speaker 1: for German in the United States because we won that war.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, did you know? It's definitely you guys by yourselves.
Speaker 1: No, totally, Okay. The other time that the UK like
Speaker 1: kind of comes up looking good in history is like
Speaker 1: every now and then, every now and then it like
Speaker 1: hits me that the UK, including all of its major
Speaker 1: empire that spanned the world, but there was a period
Speaker 1: where it was the only political entity. Stuff like fighting
Speaker 1: the Nazis. Yeah, that's like I gotta hear that one
Speaker 1: to them, the points for that, Yeah, And there was like.
Speaker 2: Look, there were lots of it really wasn't inevitable. For
Speaker 2: all the dreams and reams of movies and podcasts and
Speaker 2: books that come out about World War II history, particularly
Speaker 2: in the UK, there's still so much that is under report.
Speaker 2: Oh here's something that's relevant in terms of how things
Speaker 2: are stories that we tell polddictionally. So I don't know
Speaker 2: if you heard about this, but there's a big thing
Speaker 2: about the blitz in London, about how everybody went down
Speaker 2: to the underground to shelter or the.
Speaker 1: Working carg Yeah, socialists who came up. Sorry, please tell
Speaker 1: the story.
Speaker 2: I told you this before.
Speaker 1: Don't tell me the story. Tell me the story.
Speaker 2: I tend to not know. I'm going to go back
Speaker 2: a second, Okay, So I don't know if you know, Margaret,
Speaker 2: I don't. In the Second World War, there's this whole
Speaker 2: thing about how people sheltered in the Blitz in the
Speaker 2: London underground and how all the different communities of London
Speaker 2: came together to shelter from the bombs. But did you
Speaker 2: know that this was actually not the plan originally. It
Speaker 2: was the British Communist Party, the London Communist Party. They're
Speaker 2: ripped down the exactly, they ripped down the barriers and
Speaker 2: so working for the lass people of the East End
Speaker 2: who didn't have their own shelters flooded into the underground
Speaker 2: at Oldgate I believe it was in the Blitz of
Speaker 2: September forty one, and after that it was just open season.
Speaker 2: The gates had been blocked off because the government at
Speaker 2: the time said we can't let the British working class
Speaker 2: go underground because they'll never come out again. But then
Speaker 2: people did go underground, and it was this big solidarity
Speaker 2: thing and they just sort of what they ran with it.
Speaker 2: This became the more politically useful story, so there we go.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I mean, that is the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that gets written out of history all the time, and
Speaker 1: then like people try and recoup it. All that kind
Speaker 1: of history all the time. So Mother Jones running this
Speaker 1: newspaper that's not in Latin. And coal was king in
Speaker 1: America at the time, and it was fairly decentralized, non
Speaker 1: monopoly industry at the time, partly because it's like in
Speaker 1: the middle of fucking it's like hard to get to
Speaker 1: the places that people are mining coal. Right. The oil
Speaker 1: industry is like way more monopolized. The workforce was diverse,
Speaker 1: and they worked for diverse owners. When I say the
Speaker 1: workforce was diverse, I mean it was multiracial. The owners
Speaker 1: were not diverse racially. They were pretty much universally wasps.
Speaker 1: There might have been a couple Irish people in there,
Speaker 1: but whatever. Anyway, whereas the actual workforce was racially diverse,
Speaker 1: people died all the fucking time in these minds by
Speaker 1: the tens of thousands. Cavens and methane pocket explosions or
Speaker 1: just black lung boys as young as ten worked in
Speaker 1: the mines regularly. Sometimes people younger than that, but like
Speaker 1: you know, you got wait till you're double digits before
Speaker 1: you go into that mine. Son and mining towns were
Speaker 1: super isolated and people had to shop at the company store,
Speaker 1: and it was just bad. We've covered a fuck ton
Speaker 1: of times on this show. Mother Jones showed up with
Speaker 1: the United Mine Workers, an industrial union that was willing
Speaker 1: to affiliate with either of the two larger federations, both
Speaker 1: the Knights of Labor and the AFL. But the United
Speaker 1: Mine Workers was mostly more radical than either of those groups.
Speaker 1: It had radicals and moderates within it, but it was
Speaker 1: like skewed, a little bit more lefty, a little more socialist,
Speaker 1: and it came out fighting and it was nearly destroyed
Speaker 1: in several nationwide strikes, only to emerge as the largest
Speaker 1: union in the country for decades. Mother Jones says it
Speaker 1: that happened because of her, and again she's not not
Speaker 1: part of that. She is perfect for this job. She
Speaker 1: can get along with workers. One miner set about her.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna get into the like Mother Jones being
Speaker 1: kind of cool section. She came into the mine one
Speaker 1: day and talked to us in our workplace in the
Speaker 1: vernacular of the mines. How she got in, I don't know,
Speaker 1: probably just walked in and defied anyone to stop her.
Speaker 1: When I first knew her, she was in her late
Speaker 1: middle age, a woman of medium height, very sturdily built,
Speaker 1: but not fat. She dressed Yeah, I love that people
Speaker 1: have to include. Anyway, she dressed conventionally and was not
Speaker 1: at all unusual in appearance. I think this is before
Speaker 1: she gets into the black dresses thing. She would take
Speaker 1: a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including
Speaker 1: some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses.
Speaker 3: Oh there's that cousin.
Speaker 1: Okay, absolutely, it was like why I like her?
Speaker 2: I mean, like whatever, she's nanniog basically, I don't know
Speaker 2: who that is. By the stage Terry Pratchett reference.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, oh fuck yeah is that one of the witches?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the jolly one.
Speaker 1: Okay. I have read more of the Terry Pratchett cop
Speaker 1: books than the Witch books. I'm embarrassed about this.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were more available. People handed them to me. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the quote, this might have been considered a
Speaker 1: little fast in ordinary women, but the miners knew and
Speaker 1: respected her. They might think her a little queer, perhaps
Speaker 1: it was an odd kind of work for a woman
Speaker 1: in those days, but they knew she was a good
Speaker 1: soul and a friend of those who most lacked friends.
Speaker 1: When she started to speak, she could carry an audience
Speaker 1: of miners with her. Every time her voice was low
Speaker 1: and pleasant, with great carrying power. She didn't become shrill
Speaker 1: when she got excited. Instead, her voice dropped in pitch
Speaker 1: and the intensity of it became something you could almost
Speaker 1: feel physically, which is like a good like how to
Speaker 1: be a public speaker, thing that I'd never considered before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. She had a complete disregard for danger or hardship
Speaker 1: and would go in wherever she thought she was needed.
Speaker 1: And she cared no more about approval from union leaders
Speaker 1: than operators. Wherever people were in trouble, she showed up
Speaker 1: to lead the fight with tireless devotion. With all this,
Speaker 1: she was no fanatic. She had a lively sense of humor.
Speaker 1: She could tell wonderful stories, usually at the expense of
Speaker 1: some boss, and she couldn't resist the temptation to agitate,
Speaker 1: even in a joke. And she exuded a warm friendliness
Speaker 1: and human sympathy. So this is the thing that she
Speaker 1: does very good at and changes the face of labor
Speaker 1: in the United States. She becomes what's known as a
Speaker 1: walking delegate. I think she made up this term, but
Speaker 1: it is what she did. She wandered full time. She
Speaker 1: would radicalize people and recruit people, and like it's fucking impressive.
Speaker 1: She's like in her like seventies and eighties while she's
Speaker 1: doing this shit, and like some of these places she
Speaker 1: has to walk across creeks and shit, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety seven, the union went on strike and
Speaker 1: twenty thousand workers near Pittsburgh walked off the job. Mother
Speaker 1: Jones kept them fed, convincing farmers to donate food directly
Speaker 1: to the workers. She put on pageants and would like
Speaker 1: do things like crown a child the queen of the strikers.
Speaker 2: That's really good. Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And she also brought women to the strikes, and this
Speaker 1: has talked up a lot in history about how she
Speaker 1: brought women out to the strikes. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that I've run across by reading about strikes in
Speaker 1: America for living for the past three years, is that
Speaker 1: I've never read about women not coming to the strikes.
Speaker 1: Women always coming to the strikes, even if the women
Speaker 1: themselves aren't on strike, which they often are. Women show
Speaker 1: up to strikes to support their husbands and show up
Speaker 1: fighting violently in a good way and dying not in
Speaker 1: a good way. For workers' rights since always, I have
Speaker 1: not run across a counter example to this. It's still
Speaker 1: a good thing that Mother Jones did. She didn't invent it,
Speaker 1: and she absolutely, to the end of her days, was
Speaker 1: opposed to women's liberation from the home. The women's place
Speaker 1: isn't supporting her husband. I think she kind of like
Speaker 1: is like, look, you're an equal, but this is your job,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So do you think this was strategic in any way?
Speaker 2: Like could is this her real opinion or is this
Speaker 2: part of the general thing she was doing to keep
Speaker 2: as many people on board as possible because you know,
Speaker 2: feminism's not historically popular.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is her real opinion. And as
Speaker 1: much as she has, I think she lives as Mother
Speaker 1: Jones to the degree where she doesn't really exist as
Speaker 1: much Mary Jones anymore. She's no longer no one's calling
Speaker 1: her Mary Jones. She's signing everything mother. She is this
Speaker 1: persona full time, but it is absolutely part of this persona,
Speaker 1: and I think she means it. She even sees her
Speaker 1: own work as being mother to the working class. Right,
Speaker 1: She's like taking care of her boys, even at times
Speaker 1: when it wouldn't be politically advantageous for her to fight
Speaker 1: against women's suffrage. She does, like even like in the
Speaker 1: like nineteen tens and twenties, when like women's suffrage is
Speaker 1: like happening, she's like not fuck all that. So I like,
Speaker 1: I think she means it. I think she's like, this
Speaker 1: is the role that like we are supposed to have.
Speaker 2: I mean, it make emotional sense if this is a
Speaker 2: person who had a husband who she maybe loved, who
Speaker 2: had four kids, and she didn't choose to walk away
Speaker 2: from that that was taken from her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like her mother to the movement thing is
Speaker 1: really interesting, you know, and also like a lot of
Speaker 1: it is she's like women suffrage like a middle class movement.
Speaker 1: Fuck all those like rich bitches or whatever. But like
Speaker 1: she seems to mean it. But I also think that
Speaker 1: you're probably right that like coming in and being like
Speaker 1: but she'll talk about socialism, you know, she'll talk about
Speaker 1: being like like later she's just an organizer for the
Speaker 1: Socialist Party, which is like not a popular thing to
Speaker 1: go around telling people to do, you know.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, generally speaking, it's I don't know.
Speaker 2: In terms of political strategy, is often much easier to
Speaker 2: pick one unpopular thing.
Speaker 1: Just one, yeah, that makes sense, two or three, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but anyway, no, no, that makes sense. And so this
Speaker 1: strike wins, the Pittsburgh strike, it wins in January eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, and instead of a twenty percent pay cut,
Speaker 1: the miner's got a small raise and they won the
Speaker 1: right to organize, and within five years they literally doubled
Speaker 1: their wages and won the eight hour workday, because fucking
Speaker 1: unionizing works amazing. This unionized soft coal country, while eastern
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania and I think West Virginia are anthracite primarily, which
Speaker 1: is hard coal, and it's like way less unionized, and
Speaker 1: I don't think there's something specific, and though coal is
Speaker 1: just a very different culture of these two ways of mining.
Speaker 1: So when the anthracite miner struck in eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: mother Jones showed up and organized, and the boarding house
Speaker 1: kicked her out when they figured out who she was.
Speaker 1: So she went to stay with some miners and then
Speaker 1: they were evicted the next day out of their company home.
Speaker 1: People seeing what happened stiffened their resolve. They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: these motherfuckers are throwing people out just for letting this
Speaker 1: old lady crash like fuck that. You know, women formed
Speaker 1: mop and broom brigades. This one's clever. I like this one.
Speaker 1: What so to shame scabs from working. There was a
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven guard outside the mines. That would
Speaker 1: be a woman holding either a mop or a broom
Speaker 1: in one hand and a baby in the other.
Speaker 2: Wow, fantastic.
Speaker 1: And it was like, this baby is starving because of you,
Speaker 1: you motherfucker and mother Jones went around and sourced donations
Speaker 1: to feed everyone, and people were hungry and cold, but
Speaker 1: they won soon. She was a pay organizers. She made
Speaker 1: about five hundred dollars a year, which is about eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand dollars now, which is like, you know about what
Speaker 1: a low paid organizer makes. Now. I'm going to say
Speaker 1: the Union was her religion. She called priests and Minister
Speaker 1: sky Pilots and talked about how you should get Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got a little piece of heaven before you die.
Speaker 1: But she still couched everything in super religious terms. It's honestly,
Speaker 1: it's kind of cool. It's very interesting.
Speaker 2: It's also Terry Pratchett who says, well, he's talking about
Speaker 2: Lord of the Rings. He says, if you're writing a
Speaker 2: fantasy novel, and Lord of the Rings is like Mount
Speaker 2: Fuji and Japanese painting. It's like, oh, if you're not
Speaker 2: talking about it, you're standing on it. And I think
Speaker 2: for former Catholics it's the same, like you might not
Speaker 2: be talking about Catholicism, but you're standing on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally if it's not in the frame, yeah, or
Speaker 1: that its absence is a specific choice.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: So she goes around. She tells stories, and she tells
Speaker 1: how everyone's joining in the union, whether or not this
Speaker 1: is true, and how all Irish mothers love their union
Speaker 1: sons but not no scabs, and she is soon a celebrity.
Speaker 1: The United mind Workers' president said, I don't believe there
Speaker 1: is a mine worker from one end of the country
Speaker 1: to the other who does not know her name. She
Speaker 1: also derided men as not really men if they weren't
Speaker 1: union like the essence of masculinity, that she would deride
Speaker 1: people with solidarity, and she would like regularly use a
Speaker 1: like you're gonna make me a like old lady, do
Speaker 1: this instead of you, you fucking coward, piece of shit.
Speaker 1: You're not a real man, which is like, I think.
Speaker 2: That's funny, genderous part of the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, West Virginia was the impossible state to organize. It's
Speaker 1: like one of the most isolated places in the country.
Speaker 1: There's like still like not a lot of highways that
Speaker 1: go through most of West Virginia and has like the
Speaker 1: worst conditions. Actually still there's a ton of people. Like literally,
Speaker 1: when you leave my house and you drive past a
Speaker 1: spring by the side of the road, there's always trucks
Speaker 1: lined up filling up water drugs because a ton of
Speaker 1: people who live in West Virginia all over the state
Speaker 1: don't have access to running water at home and rely
Speaker 1: on public springs.
Speaker 3: Wow, I didn't know that, do you.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, I'd read about it before I moved here,
Speaker 1: and then I'm just like, oh, yeah, no, there's one
Speaker 1: of those, like you know, and the mine owners were
Speaker 1: like the most brutal in West Virginia. It was just
Speaker 1: like the hardest fucking state, right. Other organizers would go
Speaker 1: around quietly to talk to families in secret. Mother Jones
Speaker 1: held huge rallies. Like she's kind of cool at this point, right,
Speaker 1: she holds huge rallies. She travels with the Mother Jones.
Speaker 2: Band, and I don't know even a music band.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, I assume it's like you know, it's fucking
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties, early nineteen hundred, so it's probably a fucking
Speaker 1: marching band.
Speaker 2: It would be a marching band now that we both
Speaker 2: met activists, you know, it would be a samba band.
Speaker 2: But it's the same.
Speaker 1: You see, I would rather as the marching band. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not like because samba's worst music. But just when I imagine
Speaker 1: the white people traveling around us the band, we're not talking.
Speaker 2: About samba music here, We're not talking about sumber music.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the specific samba band that comes on
Speaker 2: every left wing march. It's the same people, I'm convinced,
Speaker 2: and like it's always just a bit too loud, and
Speaker 2: you have to be like yay, yeah them, it would
Speaker 2: be them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. At one point, she was arrested for speaking
Speaker 1: in West Virginia and they offered to put her up
Speaker 1: in a hotel waiting trial, but she insisted that she
Speaker 1: go to jail with her boys, and in court, the
Speaker 1: judge called her the most dangerous woman in America. She
Speaker 1: loved that, I know, I know, and then she called
Speaker 1: the judge scab. But then she later was like, we're
Speaker 1: about the same age. We'll be hanging out in heaven
Speaker 1: when we're both dead soon.
Speaker 2: Was she flirting with this judge?
Speaker 3: Maybe?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, because like I heard one way that
Speaker 1: people talked about being like, oh, she was like basically
Speaker 1: saying I'll see you in hell. But then I like
Speaker 1: read the actual quote and I was like, no, I'll
Speaker 1: see you in heaven, you know, And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. I think it was like kind of a
Speaker 1: like like right now, and then Wobblei's who call everyone
Speaker 1: fellow worker, like still to this day because I guess
Speaker 1: I'm one now, but like, you know, because we're kind
Speaker 1: of cringey, they'll like call everyone fellow worker. So at
Speaker 1: one point a bunch of Wobblis are on trial and
Speaker 1: so they're just like calling the prosecutor fellow worker the
Speaker 1: whole time.
Speaker 2: I loved that. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: Anyway, the judge gave everyone in sixty days in jail,
Speaker 1: but suspended her sentence because she was a like old woman.
Speaker 1: She leaves West Virginia. She goes to Colorado, where the
Speaker 1: Western Federation of Miners were slightly more radical and fighting
Speaker 1: are organizing, and soon she's working to recruit people to
Speaker 1: the Socialist Party of America much like I'm trying to
Speaker 1: recruit you into buying stuff, especially medieval weapons, potatoes. What
Speaker 1: have we been sponsored by recently on this show? Really
Speaker 1: into the medieval weapons, saying Latin classes.
Speaker 2: And actual medieval weapons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why not? Like, let's just be sponsored ones, rubber ones.
Speaker 1: Both are fine, they both have their purposes.
Speaker 3: Flails are a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I've been asking guests recently, like which medieval
Speaker 1: weapon would you like us to get a spot answorship from?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What what medieval weapon you here for?
Speaker 2: Catholicism?
Speaker 1: Now, come on a like violent instrum. I see what
Speaker 1: you did there? Uh huh uh, all right, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be sponsored by Catholicism, but I guess we are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's have a Morning Star.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what everyone picks. They all call it a
Speaker 1: flail because it called the coolest name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, because I used to my story with radical
Speaker 2: newspaper starts working for the Morning Stuff. Still the world's
Speaker 2: only daily English language communist newspaper. Wow, Or it wasn't
Speaker 2: twenty ten.
Speaker 1: It's intentionally named after like this is what Satan's name is? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought so. That's how you know it's been around
Speaker 1: since is what nineteenth century or something.
Speaker 2: I think it's at least one hundred years old.
Speaker 1: That's cool. Well, that's who were sponsored by the Satanic Church.
Speaker 1: Here you go, We're back. And now I'm feeling bad
Speaker 1: about how I did the ad transition because the State
Speaker 1: Tang Church is an actual thing. I just mean, like
Speaker 1: both Satan and the Catholic Church. That's who were sponsored by.
Speaker 1: We just wanted to cover all our bases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we love them.
Speaker 1: So besides coal miners, the main other group that she
Speaker 1: wants to organize is well, she wants to organize adults
Speaker 1: so that children don't have to work, which is a
Speaker 1: good thing to do. She does it in ways that
Speaker 1: I'm not convinced are good. In nineteen oh three, she
Speaker 1: led the March of the Mill Children from Philly to
Speaker 1: the summer home of Roosevelt, the President, and they went
Speaker 1: on this like long march where they would stop everywhere
Speaker 1: and have these huge shows where the kids were kind
Speaker 1: of the entertainment and it was like kids who were
Speaker 1: like missing limbs and shit from mine work. At one
Speaker 1: point they teamed up with an exotic animal guy to
Speaker 1: basically add the kids to his evening circuses like the
Speaker 1: kids were then locked in cages during the like circus
Speaker 1: while like lions are roaring and shit. And then at
Speaker 1: the end she came out and gave it talk about
Speaker 1: the evils of child labor. But it was like it
Speaker 1: wasn't free. It was people going to the circus and
Speaker 1: paying the lion guy.
Speaker 3: Hmm.
Speaker 2: This is basically a benefit.
Speaker 1: It's a benefit for the circus.
Speaker 2: Americans do this now. It's I don't know. I went
Speaker 2: as somebody's date to a like a charity jalla benefit thing,
Speaker 2: which we don't have. I think the same in the
Speaker 2: funding of like public good works is different. But like
Speaker 2: there were a lot of local kids from like a
Speaker 2: local theater, which was the thing. That benefit was full.
Speaker 2: They just made these little kids get up on stage
Speaker 2: and sing little songs about how grateful they were, and
Speaker 2: it was I didn't know what to do. It was horrible.
Speaker 2: It was really horrible. I just I wasn't a good
Speaker 2: date at that thing. I was. It's not the place
Speaker 2: where you take someone like me as your date expecting
Speaker 2: that I'll behave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what was happening here. It seems like this
Speaker 1: is usually just presented in the like long list of
Speaker 1: amazing things Mother Jones did, and I'm like, okay, there's
Speaker 1: some theatrics, you know, she does like the theatrical stuff.
Speaker 1: Her march started out with like two hundred people. It's
Speaker 1: mostly adult too, a long for support and like helping
Speaker 1: run it. One by one they dropped out and they
Speaker 1: would say shit like I liked working sixty hour shifts
Speaker 1: in the mines better than this. I'm being treated horribly.
Speaker 1: I'm not putting up with this shit anymore. I sleep outside.
Speaker 1: She sleeps in a hotel.
Speaker 2: Like, fuck this, She's in her seventies.
Speaker 1: It's true, But here's where you start seeing more of this,
Speaker 1: like she's a celebrity and she is like there's two
Speaker 1: ways to tell this story and neither one is like
Speaker 1: right or wrong. But like, h yeah, no, I get yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm like, look, a random thirty year old can sleep outside,
Speaker 1: will seven year old sleeps in a hotel. That's fine
Speaker 1: by me. But like, if the labor conditions at your
Speaker 1: labor march are so bad that everyone's leaving to go
Speaker 1: back to work for the minds, you know it's pretty bad, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not a good sign. Yeah, And I was thinking about
Speaker 1: as I was writing this, I was thinking about how
Speaker 1: much her lying bothered me, and I was thinking, like,
Speaker 1: I'm being too hard on her, you know, because I
Speaker 1: was reading how she would write descriptions. She wrote all
Speaker 1: these articles. Her first article she ever published actually was
Speaker 1: about the horrors of child labor, And I was like,
Speaker 1: why has it bothered me so much that she's lying
Speaker 1: about this? And then I'm like, well, because she's first
Speaker 1: I was thinking, well, she's wolf crying, right. If she
Speaker 1: lies about everything, then there's no reason to believe her
Speaker 1: political journalism because she will say whatever is politically useful
Speaker 1: to her. And so I'm thinking that right as I'm
Speaker 1: reading this, and I'm like, yeah, but obviously she's still
Speaker 1: not lying about child Let know she was lying about
Speaker 1: child labor. In her articles about child labor, she would
Speaker 1: just exaggerate how bad it was. Constantly she would exaggerate.
Speaker 1: You don't have to lie about child labor to present
Speaker 1: it as bad, And you don't have to lie about
Speaker 1: Iceland to make it cool. Iceland is cool and child
Speaker 1: labor is bad, and the oppression of the Irish people
Speaker 1: is real. You don't need to pretend like people were
Speaker 1: marching around with heads on spikes of bayonets.
Speaker 2: Before fact checking. There is a like the line between
Speaker 2: rhetoric and polemic that is entirely unmoored from the reality
Speaker 2: based community, and real journalism is fuzzier. Yeah, it takes
Speaker 2: a lot to There may not have been the same
Speaker 2: assumption as I think we have now, which is good
Speaker 2: that anything appearing in a newspaper presenting itself as journalism
Speaker 2: will have been checked out.
Speaker 1: I see that. So you're saying that, like the reader
Speaker 1: might not have the same expectation of truth.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmmm hmm. I'm actually I'm truly not sure, but
Speaker 2: there's at least not the same expectation that somebody will
Speaker 2: have double checked this. You just have to believe mother Jones,
Speaker 2: which I guess is the is the issue.
Speaker 1: Right, and historians have checked her and she was lying, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess she's writing in an age where it
Speaker 2: didn't matter in the same way for the polemic to
Speaker 2: be effective if this was true or not.
Speaker 1: But see, that's like the thing that I don't like truthiness.
Speaker 1: I don't like the idea of telling people in a
Speaker 1: exaggerated evil. I don't think that that's how you build
Speaker 1: free thinking people. Agreed, And so I dislike that she
Speaker 1: lies about child labor when you can tell the truth
Speaker 1: about child labor, because child labor is really bad and
Speaker 1: really easy to explain as bad.
Speaker 2: And although I'm just Devil's advocating here, no devil has
Speaker 2: more than enough that because as we know, but at
Speaker 2: this time, we all know that child labor is very,
Speaker 2: very bad. But people one hundred and some years ago
Speaker 2: didn't necessarily all operate on that assumption.
Speaker 1: So it's true. Although one of the things that she
Speaker 1: would lie about, she would lie and say that labor
Speaker 1: was the only people fighting for child labor laws and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, right, whereas by and large it was
Speaker 1: religious groups and like more like reformers who were doing that.
Speaker 1: So she's lying about like other stuff as well. But
Speaker 1: that's like kind of a like that's the sort of
Speaker 1: lie that it's really easy to fall into. I worry
Speaker 1: all the time about what I'm like, and then the
Speaker 1: anarchist did everything right, you know, and it's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: we didn't.
Speaker 2: The Catholic Church has never done anything good. In Mother
Speaker 2: Jones reading, she's not going to let the church.
Speaker 1: Have that, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that
Speaker 1: her problem, the problem she presented with child labor is
Speaker 1: actually different because the church and reformers were presenting a
Speaker 1: moral issue where children should get to be children. For
Speaker 1: this reason, her argument is more economic. Oh, of course,
Speaker 1: her argument is a little bit like it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like kids are stealing the jobs.
Speaker 2: Oh man, kids go home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it's it's only a little bit like that.
Speaker 1: But she specifically ties it into an economic argument instead
Speaker 1: of a moral argument. But I mean it's not wrong, no, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean, like whatever, it's the same as like, it's
Speaker 1: not the same as but it's comparable to the abolition
Speaker 1: of slavery, where it's like, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are making economic arguments because they actually cared about
Speaker 1: moral arguments, but we're trying to use any argument that
Speaker 1: they could make. But to continue onward with our journey
Speaker 1: through Mother Jones's time, she tries to go with this
Speaker 1: march of children to go see Roosevelt. She's like kind
Speaker 1: of like all the time, she's always like, oh, this
Speaker 1: President's going to like me, Like this governor is going
Speaker 1: to like me, like this may like she just kind
Speaker 1: of has this thing where she's always sort of appealing
Speaker 1: to authority or I'm looking for that because I dislike
Speaker 1: her at this point, right, whatever.
Speaker 2: And you do not like people who want to appeal
Speaker 2: to authority. That's very much not your favorite thing at all. Right,
Speaker 2: I've met you too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a bias that I have. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: then one of the other coolest things that she's credited
Speaker 1: has having done is that she was one of the
Speaker 1: founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, who have
Speaker 1: been on this podcast by accident like dozens of times
Speaker 1: and on purpose several times because they keep doing cool shit.
Speaker 1: They were formed in nineteen oh five and they're like
Speaker 1: the most explicitly anti racist union in American history, and
Speaker 1: mother Jones's credit is one of the founders. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: what happened was, oh no, she showed up to the
Speaker 1: first two meetings, was kind of quiet, signed her name
Speaker 1: on the thing, and then never went to another meeting again,
Speaker 1: and then spent the rest of her time like talking
Speaker 1: shit on the IWW never a wobbly She was technically
Speaker 1: there at the beginning. Her ideology does not line up
Speaker 1: with industrial unionism by and large. Well, she's not anti
Speaker 1: industrian unionism, but like it's not her thing. They're too violent,
Speaker 1: they're too radical. She doesn't like them, So one of
Speaker 1: the things that was in the back of my mind
Speaker 1: will like, at least she did the thing, you know,
Speaker 1: no now. Instead, in nineteen oh five, she joins the
Speaker 1: Socialist Party of America and she spent seven years advocating
Speaker 1: for people to join the Socialist Party, which largely split
Speaker 1: from the IWW because they were the Socialist Party was
Speaker 1: like less revolutionary. They were more interists in politics and
Speaker 1: lessened to syndicalism as a means of social change. But
Speaker 1: she stayed on the outs of the Socialist Party, which
Speaker 1: makes me like her a little bit because she honestly
Speaker 1: hated how middle class they were, and she did not
Speaker 1: hide her contempt for anyone who was not working class. Right,
Speaker 1: She's like, fuck these motherfuckers. She also got in a
Speaker 1: fight with a Socialists because she was loaning hundreds of
Speaker 1: dollars out to people all the time. Where'd she get
Speaker 1: that money? I don't know. I do know where she
Speaker 1: got the money. She fund raised it, and then is
Speaker 1: like fucking loan sharking it. She's fucking loan sharking the
Speaker 1: Socialist Party. So she gets mad because she didn't get
Speaker 1: paid back at a timely fashion, and then she's also
Speaker 1: mad because the Socialist Party cares about things that she
Speaker 1: does not, like open borders, birth control, free love, women's suffrage,
Speaker 1: and temperance to be fair fuck temperance, fuck yeah, advocating
Speaker 1: that people weren't allowed to drink. She would also try
Speaker 1: and bribe Socialist Party officials, and they accused her of
Speaker 1: making her fortune as a lecturer. And this is where
Speaker 1: I had gotten two hundred pages in the book before
Speaker 1: I realized she was a fucking grifter. Yeah. So she's
Speaker 1: just going around fundraising and put that shit in her
Speaker 1: pocket and occasionally feeding people. And then she looks like
Speaker 1: a fucking hero all the time. And she is a
Speaker 1: fucking fraud. But she's also a good organizer. But god,
Speaker 1: and she expressed most of her anger at other women
Speaker 1: in the socialist movement. She didn't come for the middle
Speaker 1: class men. Nope, yep.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, that's that's the same as right now.
Speaker 1: I know, that's a story older than time.
Speaker 2: Everything everybody hates about the middle class is wrapped up
Speaker 2: in themophobia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's fair.
Speaker 2: Look, nobody is hating on all the upper class white
Speaker 2: boys I know with their martial arts classes, But we
Speaker 2: hate yoga moms for some reason.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good point, yeah right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like it's all gendered because women of upper class women
Speaker 2: do not have cultural power in quite the same way,
Speaker 2: and it's safe to go for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also just like I think she's I think
Speaker 1: she's kind of a pick me about being a woman,
Speaker 1: you know, m So she quits the Socialist Party and
Speaker 1: or she's run out of the Socialist Party. Oh and
Speaker 1: by the way, in nineteen oh five, she was run
Speaker 1: out of the United mind Workers. I forgot about that, God,
Speaker 1: And it was over like arguments that she later represented
Speaker 1: as being like I didn't like how not radical they were.
Speaker 1: But then if you look back at her own statements
Speaker 1: at the time, she's like totally kissing ass of the
Speaker 1: moderates and like, to.
Speaker 2: Be clear, like, I don't know how culturally different America
Speaker 2: was one hundred and some years ago, but it would
Speaker 2: take a look for me to be involved in running
Speaker 2: someone out who was a old lady. Yeah, totally, Like
Speaker 2: it runs an old lady out of their movement, the
Speaker 2: lady must have done.
Speaker 1: Something quite I know, especially as someone whose whole thing
Speaker 1: is being.
Speaker 2: Like I'm just the old lady.
Speaker 1: Yeah, old lady I'm from Ireland, where they put their
Speaker 1: heads on spikes. And so she quits and goes back
Speaker 1: to union work. She actually rejoins the mine workers, and
Speaker 1: she does her thing. She does her unique thing. She
Speaker 1: uses fiery rhetoric to sign up workers to strike, while
Speaker 1: also lying and turning her back on any actual violence
Speaker 1: if it comes to that. In West Virginia, she gave
Speaker 1: a speech that goes really hard. They wouldn't keep their
Speaker 1: dog where they keep you, fellows. You know that you,
Speaker 1: fellows have stood it entirely too long. It is time
Speaker 1: now to put a stop to it. We will give
Speaker 1: the governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out
Speaker 1: of cabin Creek. Here on the steps of the capitol
Speaker 1: of West Virginia. I say that if the governor won't
Speaker 1: make them go, then we shall make them go. She said,
Speaker 1: will not shell.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight.
Speaker 1: You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Actually to the Lord.
Speaker 1: You ought just to see one old woman who is
Speaker 1: not afraid of all the bloodhounds, which is word for cops.
Speaker 1: It is freedom or death, and your children will be free.
Speaker 1: We are not going to leave a slave class to
Speaker 1: the coming generation. And I want to say to you
Speaker 1: that the next generation will not charge us for what
Speaker 1: we have done. They will charge and condemn us for
Speaker 1: what we have left. Undone just a good fucking speaker, YEP.
Speaker 1: At the peak of her fame, when all the media
Speaker 1: was paying attention to her, after several months dint in jail,
Speaker 1: she told the press this is my fuck her quote.
Speaker 1: She told the press, one of the most striking things
Speaker 1: to me is that gradual dying out of the American type.
Speaker 1: In fifty years, the changes in type have been almost
Speaker 1: beyond belief. The Japs are not the only Orientals to
Speaker 1: be feared. The Hindus will someday make a be a
Speaker 1: serious menace. They are coming in large numbers now, although
Speaker 1: little has been said about them. And while she organized
Speaker 1: with Jews, she referred to them in her autobiography as
Speaker 1: lickspittle Jews who had sold out Christ Jesus.
Speaker 2: So okay Jesus, as my family who has symothy. There's
Speaker 2: a small community of Northern Irish Jews, and I'm related
Speaker 2: to them, and it's a very strange cultural position to occupy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. And then shortly before the Battle of
Speaker 1: Blair Mountain, the biggest labor uprising in the US since
Speaker 1: again since the Civil War. In nineteen twenty one, she
Speaker 1: was afraid that things were going too far, so she
Speaker 1: did what she always did. She lied to the workers.
Speaker 1: She went to the governor and told them she would
Speaker 1: get the workers to go home. She went and told
Speaker 1: the workers to disband, said she had a telegram from
Speaker 1: the president that if they went home, he'd address their grievances.
Speaker 1: The crowd wanted to see the telegram. She wouldn't let them.
Speaker 1: They found out she was lying to them and stopped
Speaker 1: listening to her. And I'm not totally sure. I think
Speaker 1: that's the end of her career, kind of whoa. After
Speaker 1: she's called out as a fraud at long last, she
Speaker 1: has a nervous breakdown and leaves the coal fields. Then
Speaker 1: she writes an autobiography that's entirely fiction in nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 1: and in it she praises the West Virginia governor extensively
Speaker 1: for like preserving free speech and like because she sucks
Speaker 1: up to authority. She moved in with some friends in Maryland,
Speaker 1: and she celebrated her fake hundredth birthday on May first,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty and then died at the age of ninety three.
Speaker 1: And it's impressive to die at ninety three after celebrating
Speaker 1: your hundredth birthday.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: And that's Mother Jones.
Speaker 2: Ninety three is a long, exciting life to live anyway. Again,
Speaker 2: don't have to say you're one hundred, I know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ninety three is still pretty good. Yeah, just tell
Speaker 3: the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what, And if it was all she
Speaker 1: lied about, if she had lied about her past, yes,
Speaker 1: and that was it. Yep, fine, I don't care.
Speaker 2: Same same I think you can. You are allowed to
Speaker 2: reinvent yourself in ways that do not harm others. I'm very,
Speaker 2: very prone that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, but as soon as you're fucking with the
Speaker 1: money and as soon as you're lying to the people
Speaker 1: that you're supposed to be organizing and anyway, I just
Speaker 1: like this whole time. It started off being like my
Speaker 1: working title for a while was like Mother Jones, the
Speaker 1: goth hell raiser, who I don't like as much as
Speaker 1: I thought I would, And like now it's probably mother
Speaker 1: Jones kind of a fraud, to be.
Speaker 2: Honest, this has really got to you, It really got
Speaker 2: to me. This has really got to you. It's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I've been thinking as we've been talking about, like, look,
Speaker 2: I know we both made a joke about this earlier,
Speaker 2: but look, you and me, we're both writers. Neither of
Speaker 2: us has either the name or the gender that we
Speaker 2: were assigned at birth right, And some of the this
Speaker 2: is going to sound incredibly cringed, but some of the
Speaker 2: work of being an artist of any kind, a writer
Speaker 2: or political thinker in public is a kind of self
Speaker 2: mythologization totally.
Speaker 1: And creating a persona.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's creating a persona, and that can be I believe,
Speaker 2: I hope it can be morally neutral, but it kind
Speaker 2: of takes guts to do. And this is why I
Speaker 2: remember I did this podcast a year ago. I was
Speaker 2: in the middle of a huge depression and you asked me.
Speaker 2: When you ask me to you know, what have I
Speaker 2: got to plug? I was almost like, oh God, I
Speaker 2: don't know if I want people to even look at it.
Speaker 2: I wasn't ready to have that be, to do that
Speaker 2: persona work anymore. That's been the hardest bit of it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but when it's going well, you do, it's tender because
Speaker 2: you know, even if you're saying even if what you're
Speaker 2: saying is completely true and real, it's still leaving out
Speaker 2: and enough always it's always a little bit of a
Speaker 2: fan dance totally, And I guess, I mean, how does
Speaker 2: that make you feel about mother Jones?
Speaker 1: I think that's like part of why if she just
Speaker 1: stuck to mythologizing herself, if she was like I was
Speaker 1: born on May one, eighteen thirty, I'd be like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, or even oh I was involved in this
Speaker 1: or that. It gets a little sketchy. Because she's building
Speaker 1: clout off of that, and she's using clout for money,
Speaker 1: it gets a little sketchyer, but it's once she's just
Speaker 1: actually misleading people, you know, Like I don't know, I do.
Speaker 2: You think here's a question, do you think you can
Speaker 2: use clout strategically to achieve good political ends? Because that's
Speaker 2: something it's very difficult to do right now and everything
Speaker 2: is very viable having that persona for the greater good.
Speaker 2: Let's say.
Speaker 1: I mean it's interesting, right because it's like almost impossible
Speaker 1: to make your living as an artist if you don't
Speaker 1: have a platform, right yep. And you can't have a
Speaker 1: platform that is not based on a persona because you're
Speaker 1: always going to edit. Like, I don't think I lie
Speaker 1: about who I am, but I absolutely we don't, Like
Speaker 1: I have specific lines. I don't talk about my romantic
Speaker 1: relationships or my family to any extensive degree on this show, right,
Speaker 1: And I think people probably notice that, or maybe they haven't.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but you know, it's like, no, they have.
Speaker 2: I know that because because to your point, there was
Speaker 2: a party at my house with some cool young leftists
Speaker 2: and cool young trans women, and they independently started talking
Speaker 2: about you, and I mentioned that I knew you, and
Speaker 2: I think it came up as like, wait, it was
Speaker 2: Margaret dating. Nobody can work it out. Yeah, yeah, people
Speaker 2: notice and like it's but that's like being a persona. Also,
Speaker 2: I'm telling you this because like I hope it will
Speaker 2: make you smile, and you will, but also because like
Speaker 2: that stuff has reached right.
Speaker 1: And I think that having a platform can be useful.
Speaker 1: I think that Mother Jones, even creating celebrity and going
Speaker 1: around and being like I'm Mother Jones, can be useful.
Speaker 1: I think you do have a higher uh. I think
Speaker 1: you have to hold yourself to a higher bar. Yes,
Speaker 1: when you do that, And I think that especially when
Speaker 1: people are falking with money, I don't trust them. I
Speaker 1: have no evidence that she stole money. I have lots
Speaker 1: of I mean, she was kind of a lone sharking
Speaker 1: and everyone accused her of stealing money. So I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna go until she did it because she's dead.
Speaker 2: But like I think, like I think that having persona
Speaker 2: and using that strategically should it should make you a
Speaker 2: person of more integrity. And at least in my own work,
Speaker 2: I've found because I became moderately well known quite young,
Speaker 2: I like to think that I would have been that
Speaker 2: I would have been, I would have taken care to
Speaker 2: be a person of integrity without that. But I absolutely
Speaker 2: know that I've had to be a lot more rigorous,
Speaker 2: a lot faster than I might otherwise have done. And
Speaker 2: maybe it's not the best reason, but at least it's
Speaker 2: not like mother Jon's I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or she's amazing and I'm a hater. I don't know, well,
Speaker 1: she's a racist, but lots of people have like a
Speaker 1: specific thing that they're terrible about. But like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's pretty.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's an argument there. Yeah, there was
Speaker 2: no need for that.
Speaker 1: No, she really kinda left that out and been he realized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but people sure don't talk about that part of what
Speaker 1: she has to say, yep, because her continued persona is
Speaker 1: whatever anyway. But here we are at the end where
Speaker 1: you talk about the things that you do with your
Speaker 1: persona platform. Lori Penny, what.
Speaker 2: Do I do with my persona platform? I write books
Speaker 2: which you can buy from independent bookshops online and in person,
Speaker 2: or you could go to the Rainforest site and you
Speaker 2: just google my name Laury Penny and they will be there.
Speaker 2: My latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I also have
Speaker 2: a substack which is just Lori Penny substack. And I'm
Speaker 2: also writing for various TV shows at the moment, which
Speaker 2: I'm not allowed to talk about, which makes them sound
Speaker 2: possibly more exciting than they are. I think they're quite exciting.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, whatever show you were, you, dear listener, are
Speaker 1: excited about. Laurie is writing it.
Speaker 2: It's not the queer historical Marx and Angels romance that
Speaker 2: we all really desperately want to see. I can tell
Speaker 2: you that because nobody will ever, ever ever let me
Speaker 2: make it.
Speaker 1: Well, that's it for the show and we will talk
Speaker 1: to you next week. When we talk about someone who
Speaker 1: will probably I'll like them more. I like the average guest,
Speaker 1: hope no, I like the guests quite a lot, the
Speaker 1: average subject quite a lot. And I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: all next week. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Or more podcasts and fool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 2: fool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, app A podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.