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October 22, 2008
By Greta Myers
Staff Writer
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was no stranger to hardship. The labor activist suffered through persecution by the ruling English for her family’s Republican sympathies as a child in her native Ireland. She endured the deaths of her husband and four children in rapid succession by yellow fever. She later lost all her possessions in the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871.
Her life had all the makings of a tragedy. But Mother Jones’ experiences wondrously served as a galvanizing force. They steeled her for the union battles that she would fight and they created a “hell raiser.”
Local labor and community groups honored the union organizer at the 23rd annual Mother Jones Dinner at the Public Affairs Center’s Sangamon Auditorium Lobby on October 12. On the same date in 1898, eight coal miners died during a shootout between striking miners and guards hired by the Chicago-Virden Coal Company. The miners were buried at the Union Miner’s Cemetery at Mt. Olive. The incident had such an impact on the coal mining community, that Jones requested to be buried next to her “boys” after her death.
A group of labor supporters gathered at the Mother Jones monument for a memorial ceremony earlier in the day. The dinner, which ran from 5 to 9 pm, was presented by the Mother Jones foundation.
As part of the evening’s program, folk singer Anne Feeney performed. With songs with titles like, “Have you been to jail for justice?” Feeney was a natural choice of entertainment for a night commemorating an “agitator.”
As a “protest singer”, Feeney doesn’t shy away from the political label. She quoted the singer, actor and civil rights activist, Paul Robeson, to explain her increasingly uncommon style, “All art is political. The decision not to be political is a political decision.”
Feeney travels roughly 260 days year and plays a mixture of traditional and worker’s rights tunes at labor and social justice centered events. She also writes many of the songs she sings. Inspired by the strike at the Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, during the mid 90’s, Feeney wrote “War on the Workers.”
As a child growing up in Mt. Olive when the Mother Jones funeral procession came through town in 1930, Dick Kloss remembers a community with a rebellious side that he described as, “full of widows and crippled guys and practically no compensation.”
“In Benld, they took the Daily Worker (a Russian magazine published in the’30s) and had a co-op grocery story,” said Kloss, “It was a revolt against the company store.”
Mt. Olive, at the time, was filled with rooming houses, young men from the “old country,” and had 14 taverns in the middle of Prohibition. The town was also divided along ethnic lines, said Kloss, “The east end was for Croatians, the west had Slovaks and the south was the German side of town. Mine bosses were of English ancestry.”
Dolores and Russell Senko of Mt. Olive remember the festive atmosphere that transpired in town each year commemorating Jones’ life. Croatian bands played, and there was lots of beer drinking and activities, said Dolores. Although she didn’t know the significance of the labor leader as a girl, she remembers having fun, “It was a holiday,” she said, “Everybody tried to get in on the act.”
Both Senkos’ fathers worked as coal miners. Dolores’ grandfather traveled from Austria to White City to work as a miner. The multi-ethnic miners were picked by the coal companies, “Strictly, on how physically able you were,” said Kloss.
William Stone, of Taylorville, lived that physically demanding life for 31 years. As a “roof boater,” Stone traveled 385 feet down into the #10 coal mine near Pawnee to drill holes in the top or “face” of the shaft.
“You sometimes hit water, sometimes gas, sometimes rock—and you had to be careful not to breathe black damp,” Stone said, referring to the poisonous vapor that could develop in coal mines.
To honor the hard work of fellow coal miners, Stone created the Christian County Coal Mine Museum in Taylorville.
Though there were sometimes bitter disagreements between rival unions (The father of Stone’s lifelong friend, John Sigler, of Bulpitt, was killed while escorting a company employee during a dispute between Progressive and United Mine Workers in 1934), Stone recognized the importance of the work of labor leaders like Jones, “If our unions go down, you’ll go down the drain.”
Heather Dell, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at UIS, agrees. “It’s critically important that the labor community gathers together to reaffirm their commitment for every worker in the U.S. and globally, to earn a living wage,” she said. “At the highest point in U.S. history, unions were 30% of workers. They expanded the middle class enormously by negotiating good wages and benefits.”
“Right now, we are going in a very scary direction,” Dell said, “We’re facing what’s called monopoly capitalism, which is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is about competition and monopolies are not. On Wall Street, as companies are being bailed out, they are merging and becoming even larger companies. That means higher prices for consumers and makes it less likely for workers to get a fair wage.”
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