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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday September 13, 1904
Part I of III: “Mother Jones & Her Methods”-Her Power Proved
From the Boston Sunday Herald of September 11, 1904:
(FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)
NEW YORK, Sept. 9, 1904
If there is a woman of these modern times worthy of being classed with the grand characters of history, the heroic women of the ages-Hypatia, Deborah, the Mother of the Gracchi, Veronica, Joan of Arc-that woman, in the minds of thousands of the common people of America, is the good, gray-haired woman affectionately known to them as “Mother” Jones. To the cultivated and conservative such an estimation of a woman whom they have commonly heard derided as a troublesome mischief-maker may seem an absurdity, yet history has a way of making fools of the critics.
Susan B. Anthony long ago rose above the clouds of derision and Mrs. Booth-Tucker has become a sainted memory. Frances Willard came to be called “America’s uncrowned queen” yet none of these noble and beautiful women ever possessed that large consciousness of the ebb and flow of human emotions, that sympathy with the sinful as well as the virtuous, with the drunkard as well as the ascetic, with man as with woman and with woman as with man, as does this woman labor agitator. The appeal of these other great women was limited, to sinners against faith, to drunkards and to helpless femininity. The appeal of “”Mother” Jones is avowedly to the soul of the race. She would have all men brothers, not under any especial creed or political system, but with the universal consciousness of one beating heart.
The world does not know this old woman of the people, and perhaps never will know her. Her personality may be obliterated on the pages of history. Even today she passes from place to place unheralded, makes a temporary sensation, and passes on. But her ideas quicken the ideas of others, what she makes her listeners feel is the truth which they knew before she came and which they unconsciously yearned to hear expressed. Through her lips brave notions of a higher life are set free in the thought void, and immediately become universal conceptions of humanity’s possible embodiment.
She does not force upon you the creed of “Mother” Jones, for certainly as an individual she has a creed. But she cries aloud to a careless, indifferent world, that humanity has one destiny, one goal to which it is struggling; that one nation cannot go there and leave behind another; that one sex cannot stand upon the other; that one class may not live by the other’s misery; that the elect may not find heaven alone; that sinners may not be damned and forgotten; that we may not escape by death from the earth life’s travail; but that all together must conceive the race born into freedom with the one pulsating consciousness of a divine organization.
And this vision of “Mother” Jones as one of the great souls of the world summoning men and women to the “grand roads of the universe” can only be had by seeing her under many aspects, at many times and places, watching her at the tables of the rich, in the homes of the poor, on the highway under sun or falling rain, or in those rare moments when the “intellectuals” corner her for a love feast and beg from her a crumb of wisdom.
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Power of “Mother” Jones Proved.To be sure, this is extreme claim to make for any limited human life, for any individual however great its genius. And the mere thought of calling “Mother” Jones a genius will sound to the critical, fastidious, cultivated world as an absurdity or stupidity. But it is upon the testimony of events and incidents in a career that one may most safely rest a claim of this sort. One incident alone is sufficient to prove the power of “Mother” Jones to bring the sublime to the hearts of the lowliest, an incident which might thrill the comprehension of the most jeering of sceptics.