Part One: Mother Jones: Honestly Kind of a Fraud TBH

Margaret talks to Laurie Penny about the goth hellraiser labor organizer whom she thought would be cool but was actually kind of a racist liar who was probably grifting.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that usually is about
a cool person who did cool stuff. But sometimes I
start writing a script and then I find out halfway
that I feel differently than I did when I started.
I'm your host, Margaret Giljoy, and with me today is
my guest Lori Penny. Hi, Laurie, how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm all right. Thanks. You've got a huge storm here
in DC where I'm recording, but now I'm great. It's
really really nice to be back on the show.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm about to have a very similar storm, probably the
same storm. I'm really confused by this. I know that
weather is definitely what people listen to the show to
hear about, because normally weather here goes from West Virginia
towards DC and not the other way. I don't know,
I don't know what's happening. Everything's wild. This is the
most important thing that's happening this week. But also important

(00:56):
is our producer Ian Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Ian Hey, Margaret, Hey, Laurie. How are you guys today?

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Good? We're good. People usually get to say hi to
you when you're the audio engineer, but you're not the
audio engineer today. The producer. Our audio engineer is Rory.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
No good, I'm not the audio engineer. Oh my god,
am I Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:16):
No, yeah, Laurie is going to be in charge of audio.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh dear, this is going to be rapidly, rapidly descending chaos.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
That's just good.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Mean, it's in Los Angeles where there is no weather
at all.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Ever, Oh, it's actually quite warm right now. I'm not
a fan, but you know, we make do.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I was told when I lived there that there were
four seasons hot, real, hot, on fire, and lakers.

Speaker 4 (01:45):
That's hilarious and accurate. That's really good. Okay, I'm stealing that.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
That's good. That's good.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
But our audio engineer is Rory, and everyone's sahat to
Rory because I'm weird about this.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Hi, Rory, Rory, Rory.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
And our theme music was written for us by n Woman.
Everyone comes to this show for the hard hitting journalism
on the topics of today. So I'm here to tell
you the hottest take about a woman who was born
in eighteen thirty seven and died almost one hundred years ago.
But it's going to be a pure killjoy episode. You

(02:21):
ever heard of Mother Jones?

Speaker 2 (02:23):
I have, well, I've thought. I know that there was
a person who inspired the magazine. Yep, a union organizer. Yeah,
that's about all I know.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay, okay, Ian, you heard anything about Mother Jones very vaguely.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
I know there's like a political YouTube channel I follow
that is named Mother Jones. I'm assuming there's some relation there,
but maybe not.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
They're probably related to the magazine.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, who that makes more sense.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
I don't think we'll have legal trouble with what I'm
about to say.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
That's a great way to start.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Mother Jones the person. I am not going to opine
one or the other about the magazine at any point
this week. Mother Jones the person was kind of a fraud.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Okay. So there's a version of Mother Jones that you
can tell, you can say Mother Jones was an elderly
Irish peasant woman who wore black morning gowns that she
made herself. She tramped all throughout coal country with a
pistol in her dress. She could out drink and out
cuss the miners, and she led strike after strike. She

(03:29):
was a woman who organized black workers alongside white ones.
She involved women directly in labor struggle. She helped make
the union. She was part of some of the most
popular unions in the country, and she even helped found
that pod favorite the Industrial Workers of the World. You
could tell the story all of those things I said

(03:49):
are technically true her. I'd also be lying. But Mother
Jones can't complain if I lie, because Mother Jones lied
constantly about everything.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
And she's also dead.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
So that's true. Well, she says as much. I don't
trust her, trust but verify. Yeah, exactly exactly. So we'll
be at the end of this, we'll be going to
I think Illinois where she's buried, just to make sure
she's down there.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Could it be Minnesota or one of the other states
that begins with them, I don't really know American geography.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
No it's Illinois. Yeah, no, which is near a Minnesota.
There's more than one labor cemetery in Illinois, so near
a Minnesota.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
I did not know there was a North and South Minnesota, not.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
A one, right, fair enough? Wait, no, we should I'm
trying to get into the habit of the spirit of
Mother Jones. Oh no, there's totally two Minnesota's, and I'm
from which everyone.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Is more radical West Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, exactly, Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
And an enclave of revolutionary fervor.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, exactly. And I've been there forever. I am a
thousand years old, just like Mother Jones. It is kind
of funny because I do constantly refer to West Virginia
as the better Virginia.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
I always call it good Virginia.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, yeah, excellent. Yeah, the one that didn't fight for
slavery in exists because they didn't want to. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
You know I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Oh yeah, no, though, West Virginia split off from Virginia
because they were like, well, we could fight and die
over owning people, but we don't want to. And I'd
like to say it's because all the white people here
were like anti racist. It's because they were all poor
and they didn't own enough people to be worth dying over.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
Also in its own way, fairness.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
I know, sometimes what you lack in other moral qualities
you make up for by being.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Poor anyway, sea.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, no, I mean honestly, I was gonna say, that's
like kind of Mother Jones's thing too. So she lied
so much much that it's almost impossible to sort out
fact from fiction in her biography. But historians have done
their best and This is why I know she lied
so much, is because even historians who are trying to
like her are like, and then she said this, that
is an exaggeration, or this is not technically possible to

(06:17):
be true.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
You're gonna tell me that her name wasn't really mother?

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Okay. I think her name probably was actually Jones, but
I'm not certain. And there was another Mother Jones before her,
and she stole the name.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
But I'll get to that, like no, like all the
way down. She also was probably a mother at some point.
I don't know, we'll get to it, Okay. There is
no reason to offer the benefit of the doubt about
anything we can't prove about her because she lied constantly.
And I probably don't talk about this much on the show.
I'm not sure. I hate liars just reflexively. You can't

(06:52):
trust anything they say. If they lie about one thing,
they're lying about lots of other things. Mother Jones is
a messy figure by pretty much any realistic account. I
spent all week looking for anyone calling her out. No
one's willing to. That's why I'm here with the hard
hitting journalism. Wow. Okay, By any realistic account, she is
a fraud she lied about who she was, She yanked

(07:13):
another woman's name, and she was probably grifting and did
not keep track of the money she fundraised. She has
been heroized and canonized sometimes kind of like literally like
all of her stuff was very religious, even though she
was personally agnostic. But she used very religious iconography and
was quite excited when people used it to refer to her.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
I'm a Catholic, Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Very much so, even though she wouldn't identify that way.
But she's from a very Catholic background. In all of
her way, she talks about things as very Catholic. People
tell the partial story. She organized black and white workers.
That much is true. She also, to the end of
her days, was wildly racist who organized against Asian immigration.

(07:59):
Didn't just talked shit on Asians and used racist terms
to refer to them, but actively organized against Asian immigration
into the country. She complained about Japs and Hindus stealing
American jobs and also about them replacing the national character.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
That sounds oddly familiar.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
As an Irish person.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah, uh huh, who was an immigrant of the country, right, yeah,
came over when she was fourteen or something. She organized
women and got them involved in strikes. She was also
opposed to women's suffrage. There were other radical women at
the time who were opposed to women's suffrage because they
were like voting as a distraction, right yeah, or even
people who were like, oh, the suffrage movement isn't class

(08:42):
conscious enough. It's a bunch of upper middle class white women,
you know whatever.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Right, Emma Goldman was pretty agnostic about the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
Right, right, Yeah, exactly. Emma Goldman didn't refuse to support
women's suffrage because she believed that a woman's place was
in the home. Mother Jones did. She supported traditional women's roles.
Women belonged in the home, raising kids and cleaning and
cooking for their hard working men.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
This was eighteen fifty something.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
So she's actually doing most of her work around the
turn of the century, like nineteen hundred.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
So I was going to say, how long had this
idea even been traditional for I When we think of this,
you know, women should stay in the home, cooking and
cleaning for the men's as some kind of ancient, ancient tradition,
but it was really very much associated with the industrial
revolution and that necessity of abiding labor that way. So

(09:37):
it's like this traditional natural role, even at the tenth
of the century. This was about one hundred years old. Max.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
That makes some sense. And actually, weirdly, she only started
kind of taking that sort of role once she gets
married to like an iron molder at some point. Oh right, yeah,
and so okay, and then the other final thing, well,
I mean final thing. I'll be talking about her all week.
But she wasn't as radical as she makes herself out

(10:07):
to be. She was usually on the left side of
any given union, although she was in the middle of
the road unions and then on the left side of those.
It's absolutely fair to say she was a socialist. But
she uh before the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is
the most militant labor uprising in the United States besides
the one that happened in the Civil War, when black

(10:27):
people had a general strike that won the Civil War.
Before Blair Mountain, Mother Jones lied to the workers to
get them to go home. She went to the governor
and was like, Hey, I'll get the workers to go
home instead of having an armed uprising. Don't worry. And
she went to the workers and was like, I got
a letter in my pocket, a telegram direct from the President.
That says, if you all go home, he'll listen to

(10:48):
your demands. And they were like, okay, let's see the telegram.
And she was like, no, I don't want to. I
don't want to show you goes to a different school.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
And she was lying, and there was no telegram.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
No, there was no telegram. So the miners went to war.
I really wanted to like Mother Jones. When I started,
I was like even kind of like, well, she wasn't
really an anarchist, but she's doing all this cool stuff.
She's like a goth and she's like running around and
cussing and organizing.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
You know, goths being the most political subculture, as we
all know. I'm a goth. I'm a lapsed goth. I
know you're a Goth's let's be real. Let's be real.
Politics aren't essential to that subculture.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
No, no, But she wore black morning dresses everywhere and
she sewed herself. That's cool, It is cool.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, I know people who do that now, and not
all of them. Not everybody who wears black morning dresses
that they sow themselves is also covert or overt racist
union organizer. It's not necessary. It's an esthetic first subcult. John,
you can stick there if you want, and maybe you should.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
When I came up into the goth scene, it was
like super a political exactly where I was, and so
I had that impression about goths forever. And then I
was like, oh, actually, goths do skew overall like Conna Lefty.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah, London and UK goths similar. It's aesthetic sort of
politics are an offshoot of a certain kind of culture. Yeah,
but there are many ways to be polyssicized by the
essential feeling of being an outsider, not all of them
once we might support.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, fortunately that's true. So Mother Jones more or less
everything we know about Mother Jones for the first fifty seven,
maybe sixty years of her life come from a source
that should be very reliable. Mother Jones. But she is
a self made woman, and by that I mean her

(13:00):
history has been self made, and there's very little for
the first sixty years of her life that historians can confirm.

Speaker 3 (13:09):
That's nuts.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
I know, nobody ever like saw her in public or
anything and wrote it down.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
I guess not really.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Like she shows up on a couple like census records
and shit, right, but she claims that she's like part
of everything for years. No, she like comes onto the
scene in eighteen ninety four, and so everything from before
then she's just making up. Or she was a bit player.
We don't know, and there's no reason to give it
her the better of the doubt, right, Yeah, And this

(13:36):
doesn't mean that we should write off what she has
to say about her past. It's just that we should
take it with an entire shaker of salt. She was storytelling,
as one of my friends puts it, very much, not
one to let the truth get in the way of
a good tale. Her autobiography, that she wrote near the
end of her life when she was in her late eighties,

(13:56):
is a work of fiction. It skims over her early
life in just a few pages. She's got no interest
in telling the story of Mary Harris as she was born,
or Mary Jones as she spent her early adult life.
She wants to tell you the story about Mother Jones,
a persona that she became. She claims she was born
in the city of Cork in Ireland in eighteen thirty

(14:19):
on May first.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
My family were in Cork in the eighteen thirty three.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
And I was actually wondering what part of Ireland your
family was from.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Here cook a Bear Island, which is not in fact
in Ireland. It's a peninsula just outside Cork.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
So it'll take the Rhode Island of Ireland. Rhode Island
isn't an island. I know you don't know America.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yes, I mean there's a lot wrapped up in that
statement which I'm going to gloss over. But sure, yeah,
Bear Island is just like Rhode Island.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Okay, great, can't wait to go to Providence, Ireland.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
There's a box factory mixed boxes for other factories.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Well, if you if your family was in Cork in
eighteen thirty, you could make up stuff and it would
be just as likely to be true, maybe more likely
to be true. Then what Mother Jones has to say
about I think.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
My No, my great grandfather was Mother Jones. Let's go
with that.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, absolutely, you can't disprove this. No, oh my god,
Mother Jones is a trans woman. No, I don't want her.
I don't want her.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
No, she was not born in eighteen thirty on May first.
She was born in eighteen thirty seven, and we have
no idea what day she was born. She was probably
not born on May Day. She didn't start telling people
she was born on May Day until she was in
her sixties, and May Day was a labor holiday. She
was most likely born in the city of Cork in

(15:38):
County Cork in Southern Ireland, to parents who spent some
of their time in the city and some of their
time in a town of like twelve buildings outside the
city that her mother's from. She was baptized as Mary
Harris on August first, nineteen thirty seven. Her mother likely
grew up in a mud wall, dirt floored hut that
her family built themselves but still had to pay rent
on because colonial Ireland sucks and that's what every Catholic

(16:03):
family there at the time had to do. Mary herself
probably grew up in the Catholic sums slums of the city,
choked with animal shit from nearby markets. Her parents weren't literate,
but she was probably from a young age. The nuns
at a nearby convent who offered free education to poor girls,
was like a few blocks away from where she probably lived.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
I believe at the time that there was a big
push to educate the children, even of the working class,
specifically in reading and writing in English.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Okay, oh shit, yep, it's still bad education for you, but.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
In order to make the kids and the upcoming generations
fluent in English. First, Yeah, this is one of the
reasons that free education is pushed quite a lot. Citation needed,
but the over that between education in English and the
systematic eraser of Irish language. Yeah, it's important at that time.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
No, that makes sense. That was actually one of the
reasons why I was. I knew your family's fairly Irish.
Why had you? Honestly, I guess Mother Jones would like
to play up how politically turbulent the area was when
she grew up, talking about seeing radicals hanging from scaffolds everywhere.
This is not true. It was a tense time and place.

(17:24):
People were rioting and early Irish labor union stuff we've
covered a couple times on this show. It tended less
towards like let's form a union and more like let's
cross dress and kill our landlords through secret societies like
the Molly Maguires and the Ribbon Men and the funnelly
named White Boys. She claimed that her grandfather was hanged

(17:46):
fighting for Irish freedom. This is not true. There's no
When I first wrote this script, right, I was like, oh,
it seems like that might not be true. Like, no,
it's just she's fucking lying about everything. It is possible
people did a lot of work, found some records. That
is possible that she had a great uncle or something
who was shipped off for Australia for doing secret society work.

(18:07):
Like it is possible that her family had some connections
to this stuff. She tells a story about how her
father escaped to America at a fishing vessel as troops
looked for him, combing the city of Cork with Irish
heads on the bayonets of their rifles.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Hang on, they went through the whole city with heads
on the top of a rifle. That seems both ludicrous and.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Inefficient physically arduous.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
It's a thing we said we'd do it.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah. The British are like, this is our workout system.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Everyone's a cost now. It's not political.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, And what really frustrates me about this is that
you can tell the truth about colonial oppression in Ireland
in the eighteen thirties, there's about to be a genocide.
Right ten years later she lives through that genocide. That
genocide is why her father fled. It wasn't political persecution.

(19:08):
It was the persecution of all of the Irish people.
There was no evidence of soldiers with heads on their
bayonets marching through the city, and there's no evidence that
her father was special. It is nearly certain that mother
Jones's father went to America for the same reason. Two
million other Irish folks left the island at the time
that he did, which was eighteen forty seven. The Potato famine,

(19:32):
when English starved Ireland by forcing them to try and
subsist off of only potatoes in the middle of a
blight and started kicking everyone out of their houses and shit.
A million people starved to death and two million people left.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Which is not a piece of history that is taught
in British schools.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Oh really, Like, what do they say about the Irish Famine?
What'd you grow?

Speaker 2 (19:49):
They don't. No. I learned this all from a fantastic
book called The Blood Never Dried, A people's history of
the British Empire.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
That was a fucking good name.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
I read about ten years but no. Most history education
in the UK, of which Ireland is not part. Obviously,
most history education in the UK there's a lot of
focus on the Tudors. We go almost up to the
English Civil War, and then there's a sort of Russia,
and then we sort of pick up again around World

(20:19):
War One. Seriously, like it is very it's not only common,
it's usual for British kids to study history even up
to the age of eighteen and not learn a line
of imperial history.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
That's fucking wild. Because as much as the American educational
system did not teach me a proper history education, I
did learn about, like some of the great evils of America,
Like I learned a fair amount about slavery, you know,
and some of it was even true.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
The impression I got was that in terms of post
settler history, well, there's not as much to hell, so
if you skip over certain bits, you're skipping over quite
a lot of it. But the impression I got was
that people might be taught different versions of what happened,
but it's still mentioned. Like don't some people call it
the War of Northern Aggression?

Speaker 1 (21:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Right, that's when I heard. Recently, we just don't learn
about the colonization of Ireland at all.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
But did you learn in school about how important saving
money through deals and advertisements is?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
No? I don't know what they taught us because no
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Oh, well, we're here to educate you as and the
next the next AD is for Latin classes. The show
is brought to you by sumus esta sunt aram aras
arrant aramas aratus arrun.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Iran ran.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
I don't know. I fucking yeah, thanks, I can conjugate
one word in Latin. Wrong, here's ads.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
The Irish saying goes according to the history book I
just read. I mean it was passed down to me
by my grandmother mother Gentz. Yeah, my grandmother, your uncle,
Oh that okay, huh, your great great grandfather, your great
great grandfather always said God created the potato plate, but
the English made the famine. So when Mary was like

(22:32):
ten years old or so, her dad and her older
brother left for Canada to work on the railroads. And
this meant her older brother off to go work the railroads.
He's twelve. They went aboard one of the infamous Coffin
ships alongside twenty thousand other refugees, not on the same ship,
but the Coffin ships had about two hundred thousand other
refugees in eighteen forty seven. It's called Black forty seven.

(22:53):
Typhus raged on the ships. The travel is five weeks long.
Of those who left County Cork, one in ten died
in the passage that year. Thirty percent of the survivors
in Toronto died within the next year, so it is
not good times coming to Canada. Dad survived, so does brother.

(23:17):
They make their way to Burlington, Vermont, where he and
his son appear on census records, so we know it happened.
Mother Jones was, in her odd way, a patriot and
insisted that her father was a US citizen and not Canadian.
There is no reason to believe her about anything. Ever,
within a few years, her father and her brother, who

(23:38):
was twelve when he left, they had saved up enough
money to get the rest of the family over and
they settled in Toronto. She probably went to Catholic school
and then lied and said she went to public school.
Her whole vibe is so fucking Catholic, and she constantly
refers to things in religious terms, but she hates the church,
which is relatable, and she downplays this part of her history.

(23:59):
She lived with her family and a few like bonus kids,
like poor kids. The family was taken care of in
a tiny house and they had a tiny yard with
five cows, so they were actually like doing better than
the average Irish family over the Catholic Irish family at
the time. There was a whole bunch of Protestant Irish
immigrants in Toronto at the time who outnumbered them and
would get into like little ethnic wars in Toronto and

(24:21):
go run and kill Catholics and parade around with their heads. No,
you don't have to do whatever. Anyway, young Mary probably
learned dressmaking, and when she was twenty she started getting
a teaching certificate at the Toronto Normal School, which was
a state run school. Yeah, totally. It's a very normal thing.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
The ones where they don't teach macket.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, yes, the antiog warts.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
I know.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
That's why she didn't last.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Door to the Xavier Academy.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah, she didn't last because it wasn't the Xavier Academy
and it was a state run school to teach teachers,
and it was free and students got their tuition paid
for plus books a stipend. So it's actually a pretty
cool system that they set up. But she was the
only Catholic woman's student in the entire school, and she
didn't last. There's only one other Irish Catholic period, and

(25:13):
I think people probably made fun of her, and shit,
I don't know. At twenty three, she left home for
Michigan to take a teaching job at a convent. She
doesn't talk about this much. And now she's off to
live in a third country, the one that she eventually
becomes Mother Jones in America. And for this next huge
chunk of her life, we have only her own story

(25:33):
to go on, which means I don't believe it, but whatever,
I'll tell it because it's the story of Mother Jones,
and I'll just be really cynical the whole time. And
this is basically a behind the Bastards episode that I got.
I started recording, and I like the middle of Tuesday,
I was like, shit, I'm locked into this subject.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, we've gone so far, we can't go back now.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
I understand that the behind cool people who did cool
stuff is that these people are so good and possibly
even nice, but like being this much of a fabulous there,
there's some there's kind of a flex there.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
That's true, that's true. I honestly I was ready to
have her. I made up my whole backstory be okay
when she was a super radical who like did all
this like anti racist organizing and like you know, uh,
like led workers into militant struggle. Finding out she also
like was an anti immigration racist and oh was she yeah?

(26:35):
Or yeah she lied about that. No, I think that's
the one thing I can trust her about. And also
that like two hundred pages into a biography of her,
I find out she's probably pocketing all the money she found.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Racists did just keep on coming.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
And at that point I'm like, nah, you're a fraud.
But but she also does interesting stuff. She is interesting.
She's an interesting self made mythological figure in American history.
It's like if Paul Bunyan was a guy who made himself.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Up as a trounding guy.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Yeah. So she winds up in Michigan. She's a secular teacher.
She gets paid eight dollars a month. That is all
of three hundred and three dollars a month today people
are not getting paid well. In the eighteen fifties, she
lasts less than a year before she went off to
Chicago to become a dressmaker and then wanderlust is still honor.
So she went off to Memphis, Tennessee to teach again.

(27:30):
Where she married a white man named George Jones in
eighteen sixty. He was a union man, an iron molder,
and this is one of the better paid skilled labor
jobs available to the urban working class. Tennessee is an
interesting place to move to in eighteen sixty because although
you probably learn more about the American Civil War than
you did about the Irish Famine in your public schools, Yeah, because.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
The American Civil War is covered in its own small
way by the chipmunks. Do America no, for real? That's
how I learned about things like the Pilgrims.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
I would assume that it would be like they just
teach you about it because y'all got rid of slavery
decades before us, and so you could just like flex
on us.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Did do that. I actually did some reathing into that recently,
just like primed for Like, wait, I'm sure we didn't
do this. I'm having read a lot of other history.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
But no, No, America was a uniquely slave empire.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
There were some people who were really genuinely driven simply
by morality, including a lot of working class people who
just really didn't have much contact with the reality of
empire whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
Yeah, Okay, anyway, that's no, no, it's okay.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
It's suppression, not the heroes in almost any of the stories,
as is writ and proper.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
But what's really funny is when compared to America around slavery,
they usually show up as they good guys. We've done
a couple where the British show up in like armed
slaver vaults and shit. But Tennessee is in the South
and eighteen sixty is the year before the Chipmunks kick
off the Civil War.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's amazing how long they lasted after
the original founding fathers Alvin Simon and theater right, yeah,
these were the sons of those chips right exactly.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
And so in Memphis, Tennessee, the fam and Irish were
the only workers cheap enough to hire to compete with
unfree labor, and so the Irish lived in a neighborhood
called Pinch short for pinch Gut, which was called that
because everyone's so skinny. They're starving or they're starving so
they're skinny. And it is mostly free black and Irish
folks living in the Pinch, and spoiler alert, the Irish

(29:32):
immigrants were some of the most anti black racists in
US history because the Irish were like the next up
up the racial hierarchy. They were above black folks, so
they had something to prove. And I promised up top
that mother Jones was racist. But to make it clear,
she is in one hundred percent pro black and tried
very hard to fight against anti black racism. She was
racist against Asian people. Her husband, George Jones. First of all, okay,

(29:55):
there's a part of me that thinks he was never
even fucking married. I don't know, Like.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
George Jones sounds pretty fake. I'm not gonna it does.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
So does marriage.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
And then but it's really intense about it. Well, I'll
get to what's intense about it in a minute, but
just sit with the fact that I have no idea
if this man's real. It probably is. There's probably even
a census thing on it. I didn't find the like
no historian I was reading specifically, It was like, here's
the census records on George S. Jones. But George Jones,
the totally real man, was in the International Iron Molders Union,

(30:26):
which is at the time the strongest union in Civil
War America. War caused inflation, which caused the rich to
get richer. So have skilled laborers who built the engines
of war fought for their rights. But I regularly on
the show end up talking about the fact that nineteenth
century and unionism in the US was it is more
accurate to call them white supremacist organizations and labor organizations,

(30:47):
and the iron Molders were no different or better. One
of the earliest strikes by the iron workers was in Richmond,
Virginia in eighteen forty seven when white workers refused to
train black workers, and so they went on drake in
eighteen sixty Yeah, because they refuse to train black people.
They were like, you're trying to make me train black people.

(31:08):
I won't do it.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
This is in bad Virginia.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, bad Virginia, which is actually at the time all Virginia,
because it has the split hasn't happened, but it is
still in Richmond, Virginia's in bad Virginia. In eighteen sixty
Iron Molders called for all workers in the US to
support the preservation of the union and the status quo
and to fight explicitly against abolition because the slaves will

(31:34):
steal all our jobs if we freedom. This sucks and
this is credit where it's due a break between the
American labor movement and the labor movement of Europe. The
rest of the world, at least Europe looks at the
US and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, like,

(31:55):
where for the emancipation of the working class that includes
the black people who don't get paid because the US
labor movement has always been built a little different. But okay,
also credit words due. After the war, the Iron Molders
looked at the situation and decided to organize across racial lines,
and therefore were maybe one of the first unions in

(32:16):
the US to do so. Many of them were themselves racist,
but when they formed the National Labor Union, they insisted
that black people, women, and immigrants be allowed to join
so they wouldn't compete for jobs, which is the actual
right way to handle that.

Speaker 4 (32:31):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Persila Lagwin says, I don't know if you've ever read
The Telling.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
I haven't.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
It's Oh my goodness, it's my favorite book in the
Hainish cycle. And the characters in this book talk about heroism,
and it turns out in the language that is being
translated from the story of the Telling on this planet
there's no concept of heroism. The closest word they can
get to means somebody who has made amends for a
great role.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
That's cool. I always loved the Gwin's so good. I
should just do her as an episode. When do I
find something bad? Oh no, I'd be crushed.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
No you can't, you can't. I think that.

Speaker 1 (33:14):
I know. I know. It's like when you have like
a rash or something that's never happens to me. I
don't get rashes. I'm not gross. But you have someone
else google it so that you don't like think you
have cancer.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
You know, Yeah, I have done this speed.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah that's true.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
You understand that this is the thing that's happened.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah yeah, so maybe yeah, maybe I'll have to check
things out. Yeah there's some like sketchy stuff around her dad,
but I don't want to get into that. It's a
total tangent. He's an anthropologist who kept a guy from
another race as a like look at this guy like

(33:53):
it was like from a tribe that hadn't had contact
with Western civilization or whatever. Anyway, that's not like Gwen's fault.
So and nor is this about LeGuin is about Mother
Jones and we don't know what mother Jones is doing
during the war. I know what she said was that
her and her husband were quietly pro union and anti slavery,
but it wasn't exactly a safe thing to be vocal

(34:15):
about because Memphis was like in the fighting, right, Like.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
There were people running down the streets of Memphis with
heads on the ends of their bank.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
But this is more likely to be true in this case,
but still probably not. Yeah, exactly, So she's like, oh,
you know, we were quietly pro union, but I don't know.
I actually probably believe her about this, but she has
earned zero benefit of the doubt. Her husband wasn't a
white supremacist organization, although you know, again they did mend

(34:46):
their ways. The other thing I know about Memphis and
the Irish in Memphis is that shortly after Civil War,
on May first, eighteen sixty six, her birth Yeah, on
her birthday, the Irish went on a fucking racist rampag
led by the Irish cops and firefighters at the front
of the mob. They killed forty six black people, committed

(35:06):
lots of sexual violence, and burned houses and churches and schools.
And it was a Memphis guy who went on to
start the fucking KKK. So right, Irish Memphis, good on
you if you stood out against that.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
But anyway, I've been reading recently about the political history
of Irish Catholics in America over the last century. And
actually it was an essay about Joe Biden and about
how Biden and the Kennedys, by identifying strongly as Irish Catholics,
this was a way of positioning themselves as not those

(35:42):
kind of white people, right, they have a sort of
inheritance of oppression. The Irish Catholics in America are sort
of positioned in the national story at that time as
the bridge between sort of more trad white racism and
the African American experience. And this is flying in the
face of all of that.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah, So, I you know, I've covered a lot of
like nineteenth century Irish Americans on this show, and usually
they're kind of overall. Ireland didn't send their best and
specifically because of the way that race was constructed in
the United States and the like offer of whiteness was

(36:23):
made available, and because it's true that the Irish weren't white,
they were not black, there was a racial hierarchy that
Irish were kind of in the middle of on the
Lowish end, and it was both their Irishness and their
Catholicism actually distinctly Catholicism was like, oh, you're loyal to
the Pope instead of us. Is like the big threat
of them. And then the fact that they were I

(36:45):
think we covered this in a recent episode of this show,
the fact that they were Celtic. In the nineteenth century
race science version of the world put them lower on
the wrung than the Germans who were Teutonic, and the
Teutonic are closer to the real good white people, the
Anglo Saxons, so who were.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Largely wiped out by this point, actual Saxons.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, I mean that's like when the Nazis called themselves
arian or whatever the fuck, you know, Like, race science
is not science, it's some fucking storytelling.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yeah, everybody in the South of England is kind of Norman,
let's be anyway.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
So overall, the Irish were anti black in America, I
think that that is a fair overall thing to say.
They were very heavily involved in the Democratic Party, which
was the more racist party in the nineteenth century around
the Civil War, and one of the reasons they were
involved in it is that the Republican Party was super
Protestant and super anti Catholic, and so they were like,

(37:43):
if we care about the working class white people, were
going to be Democrats. But that means we're also going
to be part of the more racist party. And you
do have a difference where like the Northern Democrats were like,
whereas the Southern Democrats were like, we are the fucking slavers, right,
The Northern Democrats were like a little bit blurri or
about all of it. It's fascinating stuff. And there also
is a ton of like Irish Republicanism that like, you know,

(38:07):
did most of the Free of Ireland, the almost Free
of Ireland that happened, A lot of them had lived
in America, Like a lot of them came to America
for a while, and then we're like, all right, we
raised some money here, let's go back and you know,
shoot the British people until they go away. It's just
it's messy. And there's also a ton of like there
are also a ton of Irish folks who are doing

(38:30):
really amazing work in nineteenth century America. But it is, yeah,
it's this story, you're right, Sorry, I'm going on this
long ass tangent about it. But like it's this story
where you're like, oh, the bidens is like the anti
Catholic in anti Irish stuff was real. That is an
impression that people faced in America, And I wish more
Irish Americans of previous generations had been like and therefore

(38:50):
we should throw down with other oppressed people, right.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's what we're I guess the whole of this story
about mother Jones is kind of about the politic coutility
of narrative. I guess, yeah, totally that way. And she's
like one of the stories we tell.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Worth Yeah, and she does good with this story, Like
there's really good stuff that she's going to do in
her life and career. But to finish your narrative of
living in Memphis, she had four kids there? Or did she?
I God, if this would be the darkest part of
the story if this is not true, and it's probably true,

(39:28):
she had four children, Catherine, Elizabeth, Terrence, and Mary while
living in Memphis. After the war, owners went on the
attack against the unions. Wages were rolled back, founderies shut down,
three quarters of the Iron Molders were unemployed, and membership
in the union fell and then a real tragedy struck,
which was that ADS came and interrupted the story and

(39:49):
just were like, ah, look at me, take Latin classes
because we're sponsored by big Latin Magnus Latinous. I clearly
had a teacher who let me cheat. That's how I
passed Latin, never learned anything.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
I would be happy if they taught me to read
a room.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
And here's ads and we're back. So then tragedy after tragedy.
Not only did the ADS come in the middle of it,
and not only the real tragedy actually, according to my dog,
is that I'm not currently taking him outside, but that
is just something he's going to have to deal with. Also,
the eighteen sixty seven yellow fever hit Old timey disease

(40:40):
hit Memphis hard in eighteen sixty seven. The Pinch, in particular,
was in a swampy area and mosquitoes with yellow fever
came and just fucked people up. The rich people got
the fuck out of town, and the poor people died,
especially immigrants and Northerners died actually because they hadn't developed
any immunity to yellow fever, and so it was called
the strangers disease because it was blamed on immigrants, and

(41:03):
it mostly hit immigrants.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
I'm understanding that people didn't know it came about because.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Right, it was the early nineteenth century before they figured
out it was mosquitoes, and yeah, if you get yellow fever,
you puke up black bile and then die, I mean
sometimes die, but it's not good. They actually tried to
assume it was airborne, and so they all wore masks
and shit, because they're smarter than modern anyway.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
My asthma theory, yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Which sometimes, Yeah, if people were treating COVID that way,
we'd be in a better position. They would burn the
bedclothes of the dead. They also burned barrels of tar
in the streets to clean the air, to like disinfect
the air, and eventually they figured out a mosquito borne
but that's decades and decades later. And then one by one,

(41:52):
her kids and then her husband died of yellow fever
all in eighteen sixty seven. Oh god, And so she
escaped famine cork and then watched everyone die in Memphis.
And she's like been through a war. She's now thirty
years old and a widow, and all of her children
are dead before her, and she would never have any more.

(42:15):
There's like a version of her story where she just
like changes the way she interacts with reality based on
the level of grief that she's experienced. You know, I
was going.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
To say I would I'd kind of want them to
be a better story. Was that I'd wanted to not
end there and to have meaning I could instrumentalize somehow. Yeah,
people reacting all kinds of very strange ways to that
kind of sisting.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, well, don't worry. Something else really bad's about to happen. First,
the Union paid for her husband's funeral. Once her family
was gone, she went and nursed those still suffering with
the disease, and then she packed up and moved back
to Chicago. She got back into dressmaking, and she opened
a shop alongside a business partner who's never named, and
her acients were the rich of the Gilded Age. I

(43:02):
find this very convenient. She stood at the intersection of
the rich in their fancy houses and the poor who
lived without homes, and she, like the poorest half of
the city, had less than one percent of its wealth
at that time in Chicago. But Mother Jones was not
born for an easy life. And one thing we absolutely
know did happen is that on October eighth, eighteen seventy one,
four years after she lost her entire family, the entire

(43:24):
city of Chicago burned to the ground.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, it's the Great Chicago Fire.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
I just learned this the other day. Apparently it's called
the second city because of the fire. Oh shit, rebuild
the entire city.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
It's not the second city in America. It's the second
time they built Chicago.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
Yeah. See, I always thought it was because it wasn't
New York. I was like, oh, well, New York must
be the first city like Chicago's. Yes, it's because they
had to rebuild the whole thing after the fire.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Jesus.

Speaker 3 (43:50):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Chicago had been a boomtown. It was hastily constructed out
of wood, and then it went up in flames. Seventeen
thousand buildings were destroyed. It did two hundred million dollars
in property damages. I was like when I first read that,
I was like, oh, that's got to be adjusted to
modern No, no, it's not adjusted to modern. Adjusted it
as seven point five billion dollars roughly right. Only about

(44:17):
three hundred people died, which is honestly one hundred thousand
people lost their homes and only three hundred people died
is the best case scenario.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
I wonder how that happened. I bet they've made a TV. Yeah,
there's I can find. I can find it out the
way I find out all American history from the tennis chipmunks.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
So one of the chip marks.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
And Darkwing Duck helped.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
There was a barn inside the city. This is like
the whatever, at least is what in the book I
most recently read about this. I actually don't remember what
other people have said. The cow kicked over a lantern.
And this is a kind of a way to blame
the Irish right because it's like an Irish lady with
a barn, you know, and yeah, burned out Chicago. I
think that if your entire city can be burned down
because a cow kicks over a lantern, it's not the

(45:02):
cow's fault or the lantern owner's fault.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
If you make people work past the hours of darkness
in a pre electric age, you're going to get a
lot more fires in working class areas.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
That's why most of the big fires I think start
that way. Citation needed that the Second Great Fire of
London started around spittlefields and a baker's.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
I didn't know about the first grade fire of London.
I didn't learn any UK London's burnt down loads. Okay,
that makes sense. It's been around a lot longer than
most American cities. Mary Jones loses her home and shop,
and she stood like everyone else on the shoreline as
everything she owned burned. And then she joined the labor movement.

(45:49):
Except she's lying again, so we don't know. She wants
you to know that she immediately joined the Knights of Labor.
The Knights of Labor didn't organize in Chicago until several
years later, and didn't let women in at all until
eighteen eighty, so she is exaggerating her entry into it
by about nine years at least, probably more like fifteen years.
This is a fid Yes, she joined the Knights of

(46:11):
Labor in the mid eighteen eighties, and she recalls her
time with them as the glory days. She wrote, those
were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor.
Those were the days where we had no hauls, where
there was no high salaried officers, no feasting with the
enemies of labor. Those were the days of martyrs and
the Saints. I would like her so much if she
was telling the truth about anything. This is why I'm

(46:33):
so mad. Like she is a kid, she's a fucking
goth Irish Catholic who wants to throw it down hard
for labor and keeps wishing she was dead.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
But what you just said could be the lyrics of
exfrent residence.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Yeah, yeah, totally yeah yeah, and uh, you know, she
writes herself into the history of the railroad strike of
eighteen seventy seven and the Haymarket affair of eighteen eighty six,
and she like bases her cred when she enters the
movement on these things. Right, there's no she's lying.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
You're saying that this was just entiny.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
There's no reason to believe it's true. I'll tell you that, right.
Shit was really bad for the working class in the
US in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. It's kind
of always is. There was a depression in eighteen seventy three.
Unionism fell from three hundred thousand to fifty thousand members
because workers were desperate for work and weren't willing to
gamble their jobs on strikes and shit like that. But

(47:27):
people still have their breaking point. There's a certain amount
that they can't be pushed past. In July eighteen seventy seven,
when railroads cut wages by ten percent, the folks in Martinsburg,
Better Virginia, was like fuck all this and walked off
the job. President Hayes sent federal troops to put down
the insurrection. Okay, there's this thing that happens when I

(47:48):
talk about labor history that people don't want to talk about.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
People are like, well, why the cops come and shoot
the workers. That's like, fucked up. They're just not working,
And there's a little bit of shooting people for not working.
Part of striking is preventing scabs from working. Part of
striking it is not legal to beat someone up for scabbing.
It is part of union work, and it has always
been part of union work, and no one wants to

(48:12):
talk about it. It doesn't justify bringing in federal troops
to shoot people, but like, to go on strike is
sometimes a violent affair. You were defending your class and
your own job by preventing someone to come in and
taking it, and it doesn't work within them whatever. I
read like way too much about the philosophy of like
looking at society through a capitalist lens or from a

(48:33):
like producer's lens and whatever beside the points lens. Yeah, totally.
The Knights of Labor were like more interesting than I thought.
I usually see them as this very like moderate, kind
of boring union with a name that they don't deserve
because it's a kind of cool name, although most people
say it sounds kind of sketchy, but whatever. I like Knights,
and even though they historically just do bad things, but
they were like into this like concept of the producers

(48:56):
deserve the products of their labor. You know. They were
like an older form of socialists essentially versus the like
later nineteenth century more Marxist style of socialists that are
going to come up more anyway. In Pittsburgh, people threw
down hard on July nineteenth, Folk shut down the train yards,
and twenty protesters were killed by the bayonets and bullets

(49:17):
of cops. The way it was phrased is that like
people didn't like being threat with bayonets, so they threw
rocks at cops, so then the cops shot them. But
the crowd routed the soldiers and then tore up track
and set fire to trains and cars, and then it
spread across. When I say the entire country, I mean
from Pittsburgh to Chicago, because that was the entire country.
Mother Jones said, quote, I showed up in Pittsburgh, they

(49:39):
told me to come. That might have been a paraphrase.
I can't remember, because, like, if she said it, she
probably was like, the boys told me to come, right,
because she's always talking about her boys. You know, she
did not go to Pittsburgh. Her account about the whole
thing is very impersonal. She's like just basically saying what
was in the newspapers. And also the railroads were shut down,
so it it's hard to travel.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Ah, good point. Yeah, yeah, it's a very good point.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
She probably saw what happened in Chicago where thirty more
people were gunned down. It's like, you don't have to
lie you were in a city where thirty people were
shot for striking. You don't even have to have been
at the strikes for that to affect you. You know.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
It's like I thought of this the first time. You said,
you don't have to lie. The oddest thing on the
cheap airline that gets you through Iceland. They advertised, like
did you know that ninety percent of Icelandic people believe
in fairies like that, and you look into it and
you ask people because it's important in Iceland, and it's

(50:42):
like it's actually in about thirty percent, which is enough.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
To be cool.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
That's a lot of people to believe that fairies and
elves are real.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Yeah, that's a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Yeah, that's the significant things like, oh, it's only thirty percent. Yeah,
you're still telling me you're a spooky witch Paton.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
Yeah, like you're fine. It's cool. Like because also when
you get to like ninety percent, you start being like,
how do they exist in the modern world, where when
it's like thirty percent, you're like, oh, yeah, they probably
like get some shit done, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, yeah, that's enough people to run those yah.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
Yeah exactly. So in total, in the eighteen seventy seven strike,
over the course of two weeks, one hundred thousand people struck.
One hundred people were killed by the state and by
right wing militias. It was a big deal and Mary
Mother Jones turned forty that year. And we've covered this

(51:36):
before on the show, but basically mainstream unions responded to
this eighteen seventy seven strike by becoming more liberal and
non confrontational. They were like, WHOA, wasn't that crazy? Don't
we all want to like just like not strike but
just instead like use reform. The working class overall had
the exact opposite idea, and so when anarchists came to
the forefront of the American labor movement at this point,

(51:56):
it was spurred on by immigrant labors, especially Germans, and
there was a whole kerfuffle called the Haymarket Affair that
we covered on the very first episode of this show,
where there was a massive general strike in eighteen eighty
six to fight for the eight hour workday. The cops
fired into a crowd in Chicago, so anarchists called for
a rally the next day, so the cops showed up

(52:16):
to bust heads. So a German anarchists threw a bomb
at the cops, So cops shot into the crowd and
also shot each other in an awful lot. The forensic reports
on that are like pretty much like yeah, they would
pretty much go by friendly fire, which like, don't get
me wrong, the anarchists shot, the cops were shooting them.
I completely full support either way. Eight anarchists were put
on trial for not throwing the bomb, but just for

(52:38):
being anarchists, and four of them were hanged, one took
his own life. Three were later pardoned by a progressive governor.
And this is the story of why May Day is
celebrated and how Mary ended up being born that day. Retroactively,
Mother Jones says that she was there. She was in
all meetings, right, you know, she's everywhere. She disagreed with
the anarchist methods but liked their spirit, which is that's

(53:02):
probably true. That is almost certainly how other Jodes feels
about the anarchists. She will consistently defend anarchists when they're
being attacked by the state, and she will consistently talk
shit on anarchists when they are not, and that is fair,
you know, talking shit on anarchists, but stealing her valor
is a popular socialist past time though, because she's like, oh,
I was totally there, you know, and May first became

(53:23):
the international working holiday across the world. The Haymarket of
Fair had a huge backlash against the anarchists. This is
the first sort of red scare in America, and it
fucked up labor organizing in the US. The Knights of
Labor had a million members in eighteen sixty six, but
by eighteen ninety they had less than ten percent of that. Wow,
and all of this, and I'm like, but I'm like,

(53:46):
but that's just the Knights of Labor because it's like
presented and the thing I read is being like, oh,
I was just fucked up, right, But the Knights of
Labor are like kind of the more old fashioned big union, right,
there's such just one group. Yeah, And I actually whatever
the history of nineteens hentry unionism as I'm slowly wrapping
my head around with this, you know series.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
But.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Mother Jones is still not really on the scene through
all of this. She's probably around or she was doing
something completely different. There's lots of ideas that have been
written about in newspapers because she's incredibly famous, so she's
not the only one making up stories about her.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
But she is famous by this point.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Not to eighteen ninety four. Now, no one knows who
she is. She this is all her backstory until the
eighteen nineties. She doesn't exist to the public record. But
there is one story that would be in character, and
I don't quite believe it because of geography, but I
don't know, which is that she got her start in
the labor movement as a soapboxer out in San Francisco

(54:47):
warning workers about the evils of Chinese immigration.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Nic and I was hoping that sentence would have a
better end.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Nope. But instead it's where we're going to end today's episode,
be where she even fucking exists.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
The one thing we're reasonably sure she maybe might have been.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
Yeah, and like it certainly would have been in character.
I don't have that specific. We know about her more
traveling starting in eighteen ninety four, so it's possible that
this didn't happen she did later in life soapbox about
the evils of Chinese immigration, don't get me wrong, But
we don't know if that's how she got her start
or not. She claims she got her start, you know,

(55:29):
back in the eighteen sixties as a union wife, right,
but fucking knows.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
But nobody is telling this story at the time when
it's happening, or allegedly.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
Right, no one is talking about her until the eighteen
nineties at all. Besides, census records just not a important
way to prove that you matter to people. But if
you want to, I don't know how to segue this
to you doing plugs? You want to get some plugs?

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Oh me, I want to give some plugs. Yes, well,
if you are interested in my writing, you can find
me on my sub steck or on the platform formerly
known as Twitter. You can also buy my books from
the Rainforest site or from most independent bookshop sites, and
my latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I have a
column book called which I should not have called bitch

(56:20):
Doctrine because I hate I still hate saying that word
out loud, because I'm British. It's a much worse word.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Then we have inversions, because there's a word that you
all say all the time for about.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
Yes, I'm not going to say yeah.

Speaker 4 (56:33):
We all know what yah capitalism.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Americans don't like being critical of that.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
You don't like saying that.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
I have read many of Laurie's books, and the ones
I've read are very good and you all should read them.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
You are a subsect too, right do you already say
that I do have.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
A subsect and I write fiction which we can talk about.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Okay, Okay, there'll be more.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Plugs, so which does mean I like it?

Speaker 1 (56:59):
That's true? Best In the end of the episode, We'll
see you all on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Bye.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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