America’s Best Made-Up Person

Once upon a time there was a person with the unnoticeable name of Mary Harris, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, who lived a private life of suffering and failure. Her parents, fleeing Ireland’s Great Hunger, brought her as a teenager to Canada, where she briefly attended a Toronto teachers’ school, before she went to Monroe, Michigan, where she briefly taught school in a convent. A skilled seamstress from a girl, she left Monroe for Chicago, where she opened a dress shop. But she moved on yet again, to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George Jones, an organizer of his fellow iron foundry workers, to whom she quickly bore four children. Then her worst tragedy hit, the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867, which wiped out all five members of her family. Back in Chicago, she reopened her dress shop, to have it destroyed by the Chicago Fire of 1871. Disaster had crowded on disaster throughout her entire blighted life, leaving no record of having done a single thing memorable.

Then, mysteriously, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, an entirely new person appeared. The previous one had been private and passive. The new one would be public and expansive. This woman would have a remarkable (but made-up) age and name and garb and task. She would be exactly (and by plan) the opposite of what went before—the most amazing work of self-reinvention on record. Mary Harris was erased, replaced by Mother Jones. Just consider the thoroughness of the changes this involved: 

Made-Up Age

Women, according to a stereotype, especially actresses or public figures, try to pretend they are younger than their real age. The made-up Mother Jones claimed to be older. Safely in her middle-aged (for that time) 40s, she claimed to be in her 50s. And she kept on adding 10 or more years to her age all the way up to her 80s, which she made out to be her 90s. Despite what should have been a cumulating decrepitude, she displayed a prodigious energy in the union organizing of her late husband. This allowed her to have beers with “my boys“ (as she called the workers), and curse the “goddamned” strike breakers, without being confused with the prostitutes around the coal mines and oil fields where she labored. Other women lied about their age to stay young enough to remain sexually interesting. She lied to escape that. It freed her to mix with all kinds of people without sexual tension or questioning.

Made-Up Name

The new person adopted a name that is not personal. It is a title. And a female title at that. If it had been male, the community in and around the mines would have had a touch of the military. Since it is a maternal title, the community was a family, made up of her children and grandchildren. Her appeal was to the women as well as the male workers.

She was photographed crouching in a tumble of her black clothing as she helped cook the children’s meal at a campfire. With her sense of theater, she sent into a mine, emptied by the striking workers, a crew of women with mops and brooms to sweep out any scabs who showed up (and who would be ashamed to hit women, or wrestle with them). One of her most famous exploits was a March of the Mill Children in 1903, from Philadelphia to New York, stopping at night for speeches and mimes, enacting the tortuous labors performed by the children in their slave caves. To cap off the demonstration, she took her kids to Coney Island, where they cowered in a cage while Frank Bostock’s famous trained lions roared at them. Having brought the children this far, Jones took a few of them farther to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay home, “to dine with with Teddy.” Roosevelt was not there, so they were turned away, but Jones delivered a letter accusing the president of robbing boys and girls of their childhood to make more money for capitalists.

Made-Up Garb

There was one thing that bound her to her past—the black mourning garb that stood for her lost family. Not that she meant to recall her personal prehistory. The new garb stood for a new responsibility, to others. In the Gilded Age, this set her signally apart from the beautiful uselessness of women’s fashions as described by Thorstein Veblen. All those hoops and bustles, long nails and high heels, proclaimed that these were ladies not fit for any gainful labor. Mother Jones’ clothes were nothing but useful, readying her for any task—whether at the mines, or at the mills, or at or at negotiations in the owners’ offices. Her chosen uniform could never go out of fashion because it had never been in it. She was not clothed to be tempting or menacing. She was dressed for serving. It was an overwhelmingly maternal garb, nothing else. Perfectly chosen, never abandoned.

Made-Up Task

Her age and name and garb could be unvarying because her single task was always the same. That task was described by a West Virginia district attorney, Reese Blizzard, when she was put on trial in 1902 for inciting a riot. He described her as “the most dangerous woman in America,” because all she had to do was open her mouth and crook her finger to make thousands of men go out on strike. She often faced guns, and trials, and prisons—but was always unarmed herself. It is true that when operators and owners brought in weaponed strike breakers to fire on “her boys,” she advised them to acquire guns themselves, but just for defensive use—as leverage for her constant goal, bringing the capitalists to negotiation. She kept calming her side with the message “Mother is with you.” And the only arms she used herself were her tart tongue and that beckoning finger. Supplied with social class doctrines by friends like Eugene Debs and Clarence Darrow, she spun out her mesmerizing oratory with a lilting Irish brogue. That made her dangerous, and the danger made her useful. The made-up persona was—in its age and name and garb and task—an entirely successful reinvention.

Correction, June 20: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing and circumstances of Harris’ move to Memphis.