Autobiography of Mother Jones by Mary Harris Jones

Author:Mary Harris Jones [Jones, Mary Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780486165554
Google: lFFfyG6DPXMC
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Published: 2012-04-29T22:00:00+00:00

Mother Jones with the Miners’ Children

In many mines I met the trapper boys. Little chaps who open the door for the mule when it comes in for the coal and who close the door after the mule has gone out. Runners and helpers about the mine. Lads who will become miners; who will never know anything of this beautiful world, of the great wide sea, of the clean prairies, of the snow capped mountains of the vast West. Lads born in the coal, reared and buried in the coal. And his one hope, his one protection—the union.

I met a little trapper boy one day. He was so small that his dinner bucket dragged on the ground.

“How old are yon, lad?” I asked him.

“Twelve,” he growled as he spat tobacco on the ground.

“Say son,” I said, “I’m Mother Jones. You know me, don’t you? I know you told the mine foreman you were twelve, but what did you tell the union?”

He looked at me with keen, sage eyes. Life had taught him suspicion and caution.

“Oh, the union’s different. I’m ten come Christmas.”

“Why don’t you go to school?”

“Gee,” he said—though it was really something stronger—“I ain’t lost no leg!” He looked proudly at his little legs.

I knew what he meant: that lads went to school when they were incapacitated by accidents.

And you scarcely blamed the children for preferring mills and mines. The schools were wretched, poorly taught, the lessons dull.

Through the ceaseless efforts of the unions, through continual agitation, we have done away with the most outstanding evils of child labor in the mines. Pennsylvania has passed better and better laws. More and more children are going to school. Better schools have come to the mining districts. We have yet a long way to go. Fourteen years of age is still too young to begin the life of the breaker boy. There is still too little joy and beauty in the miner’s life but one who like myself has watched the long, long struggle knows that the end is not yet.

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