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

Margaret finishes talking 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 is different than
most weeks because well, whatever it's called. You already listen
to part one. You know why it's complicated. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Lori Penny.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hi, Lauri, Hi, How are you doing what she is?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Look?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I think it's fair to say that she's cool.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, I have like a she's interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
You don't think it's cooled to tell lies?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
No, I genuinely hate liars. I think it's one of
the most immoral things you can do.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
And yet you write fiction.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, it's called fiction when I write it, But those
are lies.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
You understand that that's not real.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
That didn't happen, right, So, but like if I try
to convince people that something that didn't happen is true,
especially if I'm trying to like put them in harm's way,
like hey, everyone, you should pick up guns and go fight,
or you should risk your job and risk starving to death.
I should tell you truth. This is something that I
believe very strongly. I think that this is my least

(01:05):
popular ethical opinion. Actually, this is the one that most
of my friends get mad at me about but I
hold to it.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
So you're telling me that you have numerous friends who
take issue with the idea that it's bad to light
of people if they're going to be sent into a
violent action.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Okay, So it's like more as a broader thing, might.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Mind, Are these friends real or are they just voices
that surround you where you live in the woods.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Those are separate, and those are just as real as anything.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Else, right, Okay, understood, Well they're not They might not
be real, but they are true in their way.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, My like general working theory is
you shouldn't lie to someone you're not willing to punch,
or that you wouldn't punch if you could get away
with it. Right, So, if someone's exerting power over you,
you should lie to them if that's the safest way
out of a situation. Right, Like it's illegal to light
to cops, but it would be ethical to light to cops. Right,
they're exerting power over you. And so when people lie

(02:03):
in when they're trapped in like patriarchal relationships, or when
people lie to people exerting power over them, it makes
some sense. But when you lie to people who have
less power than you. I think it's punching down. And
I think that people make the decisions that they make
in their life based on the best available information. And
I think that not telling people things is totally legitimate right.

(02:24):
Not everyone has a right to know everything. And I'm
not like trying to come like super black and white
about this. I like understand why people make certain kinds
of lies at various times to handle social situations in
certain ways, but like, no, overall, I'm not a big fan.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
I understand, but I don't agree. It's one of the
reasons we get on. So you're saying that in some
ways a lie is a form of violence. It's just
sometimes a preferable form of violence to physical violence.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, I would. I would say it's morally comparable to violence.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I don't know. I have a different take on what
violence is. Let's go ahead with the story, which may
or may not be a lie.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Fair enough, But what isn't a lie unless it is
a lie? Is that our producers Ian Hi, Ian, Hey,
how are you you feel like pretty confident that you're
you're real?

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Last time I checked? But I don't know. According to
this story, anything can be true so I never.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Trust but verify. We're entering an age of real, real, serious,
deep fakes.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
And Ian Johnson stands made up. I'm going to say,
like George Jones.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Oh no, I said Laurie Penny to Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Both of us have made up our names.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
That's that's a true falsehood.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
That's true. Another true non falsehood is that everyone has
to say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory, Hi, Rory.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Hi Rory. You're doing a great job.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, thank you. And our theme music was written for
us by n woman. And we were talking about Mother Jones,
but let's talk about the first Mother Jones because it's
not the Mother Jones we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Oh all right, because she stole that name.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, I mean again, I can't prove she stole the name.
I can prove there was another Mother Jones with a
pretty similar vibe writing immediately before her in the same sphere, right,
because ten years before Mother Jones became Mother Jones, there
was missus Henry B. Jones, the wife of a coal
miner who edited the Ladies Department of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal.

(04:31):
What Yeah, newspapers were such a thing that you could
have a job where it's like, I'm the ladies department
of the Railroad Brakeman's Journal that goes out to all
the railroad breakmen and that Okay.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Okay, Margaret, Like, sorry, I'm a journalist. I've come through
the tiniest magazines for the silliest things. That wasn't the
substance of my screen. But I'm really really charmed that you.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Thought that it was uhuh wait then what is? What
was the look?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
It's just a very very very similar story and kind
of I mean, I don't like saying bullsy, but kind
of bullsy. Yeah, there's some ovaries on that, like, you know,
this sounds like a good vibe. I'm going to take that.
That's fine now, I liked it.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Yeah. She edited the ladies department for the Railroad Breakman Journal.
She wrote for other union magazines, and folks would write
to her as dear mother Jones, and she signed her
articles mother Jones. She wrote God America's is Bill Different.
She wrote religious leftist tradwife poetry for about six years.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Do we have any of it?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
There is? Actually, yeah, there's some of it in the
book that I was reading called Mother Jones by Elliot J.
Gorn has some of original Mother Jones's poetry in it.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Oh my god, I love eighteen hundred socialist poetry.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, and this one's just like very like tradwife, too right.
It's like very traditional. The first Mother Jones even more
than the second Mother Jones very much into women's place,
being as the homemaker. The strong man would do their
strong man jobs while the devoted woman would take care
of the home. This is how later Mother Jones presented
things as well. But Mother Jones Junior, as I'm going

(06:12):
to call her, was way more into cussing and shit
than original Mother Jones. Although it's funny, too, right, because
you're like people keep talking about like, holy shit, Mother
Jones would cuss. I found a couple transcripts. She says,
goddamn a lot. I feel like the bar has moved
on what counts is cussing.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, I think the standards are a little different now.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah. And so that's her prehistory. You know, she gets
this name when she is fifty seven. We first really
hear about her in eighteen ninety four, and it's part
of Coxy's army because in eighteen ninety four, a small
business owner named Jacob Coxy was like, well, the government
should make jobs for the unemployed, and people were like, yeah,

(06:56):
that makes sense. I don't like starving to death and
scrambling for work and being mistreated. So they formed up
Coxy's army and they marched to Washington. This was not
a they didn't have guns and shit. This is like
a marching to Washington's like a big America thing, you know.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, I've heard of some marches on Washington. The Chipmunks,
I believe, march to Washington.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Oh yeah, probably with with Duck Wing.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Duck and Chippendale, the Rescue Rangers.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
I was gonna say Martin Luther King Junior, but yeah, no, yeah,
also Darkling duck Into Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Sorry, I don't mean to disrespect American history and that way,
genuinely truly, I like, I'm too much of a paladin
to be like that's that's that's But you just got
to understand that most of my early understanding of American
history came through the medium of nineties cartoons.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Same, yeah, right, it's called hegemony. Although I'm not sure
that's how it's pronounced.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
I think it's how it's pronounced.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yeah it sounds right.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Oh really, yeah, I thought it might be hegemony.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, maybe Britain hegemony.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Yeah that sounds more British.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Let's just decide that that's how British pronounce it.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
This is like when I tried to persuade people for
a whole week. I managed to persuade people I lived
with in quarantine that we called the dishwasher the bubble cupboard.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
I think sometimes Lyne is funny.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
I would believe it.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I went on this long thing about Lyne. I think
sometimes you can like prank people, right, yeah that is
really funny, because yeah, that would have worked on me.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
But look, it was. It was like week three of
COVID lockdown, and you know you've met British people in
LA presumably, yes, Like it's amazing. All you have to
do to make someone stay a little bit better is
turn up and say stuff, any stuff. You just say
stuff in your normal voice, and then people are pleased.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Oh yeah, we love it, we love that stuff.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
For Yeah, it was pandemic. People needed something, so I
just dialed it up quite a lot for a few weeks.
I was happy to do it. I was happy to
do it.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Service.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, you're providing a service. There was you're a central
worker in.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
My own way. That's where bubble Covered came from. And
Trouser Beast, which I also made up. Oh that guy
is a real Trouser Beasts. Just it just sounds like, yeah,
there was context, but yeah, no, nobody says that about anyone.
It's it's it's a falseood. It's all.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
One time Laurie and I were walking through Boston and
this punk who was asking for money came up and
was like, Hey, do you have any money? And Laurie
was like, oh no, I'm sorry I don't. And then
this punk was really mad and was like fuck you
and your fake accent, and Laurie is like, this is.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
My real voice.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
I was raised in the woods by aristocratic mice, the truth.
That's why I have a lot of little jackets but
no table manners anywhere.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
So the Coxy's Army, one of the people who helped
this Trouser Beast army was Mother Jones. And this is
probably true because Okay, so they're marching on Washington and
the sympathetic folks who provide resources for them along the way.
So what Mother Jones figured out is that she could
go a couple days ahead of them and talk up
how amazing these people are and how they need your help,

(10:17):
and raise money for them. And look, I don't know
whether or not she skimmed off the top. I do
know she did not keep records of the money that
she fundraised, and she would regularly use it to provide
for herself and her own needs. And that also she
was later kicked out of the Socialist Party for being
accused of stealing money. But there's no evidence. I love that.

(10:38):
I'm talking about this as if I'm afraid Mother Jones
the person is going to sue me. Anyway. She figures
out really early on in her career. I mean she's
in she's fifty seven, but she's like, oh, I'm going
to go travel around people eat up this old Irish
grandma thing, you know, and so I'm going to travel
ahead and help fundraise money. But then someone probably not her,

(10:59):
I don't know, bolted with all the money one time. Oh,
because they had fund raised a bunch of money, and
then someone bolted with the money, ah, right.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
And they had to have it physically and it was
somewhere and someone nicked it.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Right, Yeah, But they kept going on May Day, eighteen
ninety four, a few hundred of them made it to Washington.
Most of them dropped off and they were ignored, driven
off by cops, and their leaders were arrested, because that's
what happens when you marched to Washington in the United States.
But Mother Jones found her calling and she kept it
up for thirty years. She was very good at it.
Hermo was to basically be everywhere at once, sent to

(11:29):
herself in every struggle, and build up this persona as
Mother Jones and become one of the most famous people
in America, not just one of the most famous labor organizers,
but like just famous person. She was fucking good at
organizing and getting people out, and she was like got
people on strike and she got people to join unions.
In April eighteen ninety four, the same time as Coxey's

(11:51):
army was marching, the United mine Workers led a strike
of one hundred and twenty five thousand people. Alabama in
particular popped off with this strike and black and white
work march side by side, which rules. They were marching
against convict labor, which also rules. But then even then
they managed to do it where they're like their banner
says the convicts must go, as if the problem is

(12:11):
the convicts stealing their jobs.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
You were so close. I know this is not a
good sign.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Mother Jones showed up fresh off of Coxey's army, even
before they made it to Washington. She's whatever. I'm not
saying she's skipped off with the money, but I'm not
saying she didn't. And she saw what interracial solidarity could do,
and just black and white solidarity, but she was into it, yes, yes,
and later Mexican solidarity. It's just like really specific anti Asian.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Yeah, we haven't gotten to the San Francisco party.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah, Well, unless that was how she got her start, right.
The organizer, Eugene Debs was arrested from that strike. He's
one of the more famous labor guys in the US,
and Mother Jones organized a welcome home demonstration for him,
and the police tried to prevent him from speaking, and
she learned one of her powers. Mother Jones told the
cops that he would speaking and that was that, and
the authorities were cowed and let him talk.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Woh.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
It was this stint in jail that turned Debs into
a socialist, and soon he was plotting a new and
better world with mother Jones. He always defended her, including
when all the socialists were like, but she's stealing all
the money. He's like, no, she wasn't, fuck you.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
They were good, good buddies. Yeah, what's the age gap
there is? She like thirty years older than this guy.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
I think I don't think they were historically close friends.
I actually don't think she's fucking anyone. That wasn't what
I wasn't playing because she hates loose women.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Oh yes, well, but like younger guys, being mentored by
like angry grandma's is one of my favorite modes right now.
So I was hoping it was that, But you know,
there's other cool eatings.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
She says she was at the big eighteen ninety six
populist convention in Saint Louis and then puts herself at
the center of that action. She might have been at
the convention, I don't know. She tried to convince them
from selling out, but then they did. The Populist party
was a thing in the nineteenth century. She never got
into like Marxism or other proper intellectual socialist tendencies. And

(14:06):
I actually think this is just kind of rules about her.
Her socialism was populist. It was homegrown American and it
emphasized the individual producer against big corporations.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
It's the kind of socialism you can buy at a roadstand.
Well maybe not buy right, people make it in their gardens, right.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
And it's like not against kind of a lot of
actually the Protestant work values that America was founded on,
like those didn't have to go more capitalists we actually
talked to in a recent episode, I remember which one about.
I think I was talking about the abolitionist movement and
Protestants versus Catholics and the abolitionist movement. But anyway, whatever, okay,
so sorry, no, no, it's the kind of thing I
can lose myself thinking about. So she started, rather other

(14:47):
people started, and she started selling a socialist newspaper and
selling subscriptions to folks. And this newspaper was called Appeal
to Reason, and it turns out to be like one
of the biggest it's the biggest leftist newspaper that the
US has ever seen.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Actually is her name and face on it? Are her
name and her face on this paper.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Well, they cover her a lot, and this is actually
how she gets famous.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
Woo.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
But about this like particular radicalism. The biographer Elliot J.
Gorn puts it like this, homegrown American radicals were not
steeped in the writings of Marx and his commentators. Their
ideas were shaped by popular authors with a socialist or
unionist bent, writers who sought economic transformation while preserving paradoxically
American freedom, democracy, and individualism. Mary Jones felt right at

(15:35):
home in the heartland radicalism. And yeah, this paper it
has three quarters of a million subscribers by nineteen thirteen,
which probably puts it as the whitest red leftist American
newspaper in history. And I think now you start getting
into where she centers herself but is telling the truth.
She probably kind of helped make this happens, very good

(16:00):
at what she does, and she certainly says this, she's
the one who made it happen. She says she started everything,
but the newspaper covered her widely and seems to be
how she got famous. And do you know what that
newspaper probably had in it?

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Oh? Is it adverts for goods, services or items.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
It probably had that because most radical newspapers did. Because
it turns out, trying to create anti capitalist media in
a capitalist society has certain complications, like the ones that
you're about to hear, which are all in Latin and Rebeck.

(16:47):
I really enjoyed when the grick a gric ali in Yeah,
that's the one totally. All I remember is the word
for farm. But I don't remember the word for farm.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
I think it is a gricula.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, you see, I'm worldly.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
And if it isn't, that will be even worse because yeah,
like what was that for. I could have learnt you know, Spanish,
which I don't know anyway.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah, No, I genuinely think that instead of giving ninth
graders the choice of languages if they're not already fluent
in Spanish, I think that American teenager in.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
The United States absolutely.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah, yeah, that's more practical. Let's be honest.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah, I do know French, but I could also have had,
you know, German.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, well, in the UK, those are both languages that
make sense to learn. Who's not a lot of need
for German in the United States because we won that war.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Hell yeah, did you know? It's definitely you guys by yourselves.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
No, totally, Okay. The other time that the UK like
kind of comes up looking good in history is like
every now and then, every now and then it like
hits me that the UK, including all of its major
empire that spanned the world, but there was a period
where it was the only political entity. Stuff like fighting
the Nazis. Yeah, that's like I gotta hear that one
to them, the points for that, Yeah, And there was like.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Look, there were lots of it really wasn't inevitable. For
all the dreams and reams of movies and podcasts and
books that come out about World War II history, particularly
in the UK, there's still so much that is under report.
Oh here's something that's relevant in terms of how things

(18:32):
are stories that we tell polddictionally. So I don't know
if you heard about this, but there's a big thing
about the blitz in London, about how everybody went down
to the underground to shelter or the.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Working carg Yeah, socialists who came up. Sorry, please tell
the story.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
I told you this before.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
Don't tell me the story. Tell me the story.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
I tend to not know. I'm going to go back
a second, Okay, So I don't know if you know, Margaret,
I don't. In the Second World War, there's this whole
thing about how people sheltered in the Blitz in the
London underground and how all the different communities of London
came together to shelter from the bombs. But did you

(19:13):
know that this was actually not the plan originally. It
was the British Communist Party, the London Communist Party. They're
ripped down the exactly, they ripped down the barriers and
so working for the lass people of the East End
who didn't have their own shelters flooded into the underground
at Oldgate I believe it was in the Blitz of
September forty one, and after that it was just open season.

(19:34):
The gates had been blocked off because the government at
the time said we can't let the British working class
go underground because they'll never come out again. But then
people did go underground, and it was this big solidarity
thing and they just sort of what they ran with it.
This became the more politically useful story, so there we go.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah. No, I mean, that is the kind of stuff
that gets written out of history all the time, and
then like people try and recoup it. All that kind
of history all the time. So Mother Jones running this
newspaper that's not in Latin. And coal was king in
America at the time, and it was fairly decentralized, non
monopoly industry at the time, partly because it's like in

(20:17):
the middle of fucking it's like hard to get to
the places that people are mining coal. Right. The oil
industry is like way more monopolized. The workforce was diverse,
and they worked for diverse owners. When I say the
workforce was diverse, I mean it was multiracial. The owners
were not diverse racially. They were pretty much universally wasps.
There might have been a couple Irish people in there,

(20:38):
but whatever. Anyway, whereas the actual workforce was racially diverse,
people died all the fucking time in these minds by
the tens of thousands. Cavens and methane pocket explosions or
just black lung boys as young as ten worked in
the mines regularly. Sometimes people younger than that, but like
you know, you got wait till you're double digits before
you go into that mine. Son and mining towns were

(21:01):
super isolated and people had to shop at the company store,
and it was just bad. We've covered a fuck ton
of times on this show. Mother Jones showed up with
the United Mine Workers, an industrial union that was willing
to affiliate with either of the two larger federations, both
the Knights of Labor and the AFL. But the United
Mine Workers was mostly more radical than either of those groups.
It had radicals and moderates within it, but it was

(21:23):
like skewed, a little bit more lefty, a little more socialist,
and it came out fighting and it was nearly destroyed
in several nationwide strikes, only to emerge as the largest
union in the country for decades. Mother Jones says it
that happened because of her, and again she's not not
part of that. She is perfect for this job. She

(21:44):
can get along with workers. One miner set about her.
Now we're gonna get into the like Mother Jones being
kind of cool section. She came into the mine one
day and talked to us in our workplace in the
vernacular of the mines. How she got in, I don't know,
probably just walked in and defied anyone to stop her.
When I first knew her, she was in her late
middle age, a woman of medium height, very sturdily built,

(22:07):
but not fat. She dressed Yeah, I love that people
have to include. Anyway, she dressed conventionally and was not
at all unusual in appearance. I think this is before
she gets into the black dresses thing. She would take
a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including
some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Oh there's that cousin.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Okay, absolutely, it was like why I like her?

Speaker 2 (22:28):
I mean, like whatever, she's nanniog basically, I don't know
who that is. By the stage Terry Pratchett reference.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Oh shit, oh fuck yeah is that one of the witches?

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the jolly one.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Okay. I have read more of the Terry Pratchett cop
books than the Witch books. I'm embarrassed about this.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, they were more available. People handed them to me. Anyway,
back to the quote, this might have been considered a
little fast in ordinary women, but the miners knew and
respected her. They might think her a little queer, perhaps
it was an odd kind of work for a woman
in those days, but they knew she was a good
soul and a friend of those who most lacked friends.

(23:08):
When she started to speak, she could carry an audience
of miners with her. Every time her voice was low
and pleasant, with great carrying power. She didn't become shrill
when she got excited. Instead, her voice dropped in pitch
and the intensity of it became something you could almost
feel physically, which is like a good like how to
be a public speaker, thing that I'd never considered before.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in there.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
Yeah. She had a complete disregard for danger or hardship
and would go in wherever she thought she was needed.
And she cared no more about approval from union leaders
than operators. Wherever people were in trouble, she showed up
to lead the fight with tireless devotion. With all this,
she was no fanatic. She had a lively sense of humor.
She could tell wonderful stories, usually at the expense of
some boss, and she couldn't resist the temptation to agitate,

(23:53):
even in a joke. And she exuded a warm friendliness
and human sympathy. So this is the thing that she
does very good at and changes the face of labor
in the United States. She becomes what's known as a
walking delegate. I think she made up this term, but
it is what she did. She wandered full time. She
would radicalize people and recruit people, and like it's fucking impressive.

(24:15):
She's like in her like seventies and eighties while she's
doing this shit, and like some of these places she
has to walk across creeks and shit, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
In eighteen ninety seven, the union went on strike and
twenty thousand workers near Pittsburgh walked off the job. Mother
Jones kept them fed, convincing farmers to donate food directly
to the workers. She put on pageants and would like
do things like crown a child the queen of the strikers.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
That's really good. Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
And she also brought women to the strikes, and this
has talked up a lot in history about how she
brought women out to the strikes. But one of the
things that I've run across by reading about strikes in
America for living for the past three years, is that
I've never read about women not coming to the strikes.
Women always coming to the strikes, even if the women
themselves aren't on strike, which they often are. Women show
up to strikes to support their husbands and show up

(25:07):
fighting violently in a good way and dying not in
a good way. For workers' rights since always, I have
not run across a counter example to this. It's still
a good thing that Mother Jones did. She didn't invent it,
and she absolutely, to the end of her days, was
opposed to women's liberation from the home. The women's place

(25:27):
isn't supporting her husband. I think she kind of like
is like, look, you're an equal, but this is your job,
you know.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, So do you think this was strategic in any way?
Like could is this her real opinion or is this
part of the general thing she was doing to keep
as many people on board as possible because you know,
feminism's not historically popular.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, I think this is her real opinion. And as
much as she has, I think she lives as Mother
Jones to the degree where she doesn't really exist as
much Mary Jones anymore. She's no longer no one's calling
her Mary Jones. She's signing everything mother. She is this
persona full time, but it is absolutely part of this persona,
and I think she means it. She even sees her

(26:11):
own work as being mother to the working class. Right,
She's like taking care of her boys, even at times
when it wouldn't be politically advantageous for her to fight
against women's suffrage. She does, like even like in the
like nineteen tens and twenties, when like women's suffrage is
like happening, she's like not fuck all that. So I like,

(26:32):
I think she means it. I think she's like, this
is the role that like we are supposed to have.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
I mean, it make emotional sense if this is a
person who had a husband who she maybe loved, who
had four kids, and she didn't choose to walk away
from that that was taken from her.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, and like her mother to the movement thing is
really interesting, you know, and also like a lot of
it is she's like women suffrage like a middle class movement.
Fuck all those like rich bitches or whatever. But like
she seems to mean it. But I also think that
you're probably right that like coming in and being like
but she'll talk about socialism, you know, she'll talk about

(27:12):
being like like later she's just an organizer for the
Socialist Party, which is like not a popular thing to
go around telling people to do, you know.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
So I don't know, generally speaking, it's I don't know.
In terms of political strategy, is often much easier to
pick one unpopular thing.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Just one, yeah, that makes sense, two or three, you know, yeah,
but anyway, no, no, that makes sense. And so this
strike wins, the Pittsburgh strike, it wins in January eighteen
ninety eight, and instead of a twenty percent pay cut,
the miner's got a small raise and they won the
right to organize, and within five years they literally doubled
their wages and won the eight hour workday, because fucking

(27:48):
unionizing works amazing. This unionized soft coal country, while eastern
Pennsylvania and I think West Virginia are anthracite primarily, which
is hard coal, and it's like way less unionized, and
I don't think there's something specific, and though coal is
just a very different culture of these two ways of mining.
So when the anthracite miner struck in eighteen ninety nine,
mother Jones showed up and organized, and the boarding house

(28:10):
kicked her out when they figured out who she was.
So she went to stay with some miners and then
they were evicted the next day out of their company home.
People seeing what happened stiffened their resolve. They're like, oh,
these motherfuckers are throwing people out just for letting this
old lady crash like fuck that. You know, women formed
mop and broom brigades. This one's clever. I like this one.
What so to shame scabs from working. There was a

(28:34):
twenty four to seven guard outside the mines. That would
be a woman holding either a mop or a broom
in one hand and a baby in the other.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Wow, fantastic.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
And it was like, this baby is starving because of you,
you motherfucker and mother Jones went around and sourced donations
to feed everyone, and people were hungry and cold, but
they won soon. She was a pay organizers. She made
about five hundred dollars a year, which is about eighteen
thousand dollars now, which is like, you know about what

(29:05):
a low paid organizer makes. Now. I'm going to say
the Union was her religion. She called priests and Minister
sky Pilots and talked about how you should get Yeah,
you got a little piece of heaven before you die.
But she still couched everything in super religious terms. It's honestly,
it's kind of cool. It's very interesting.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
It's also Terry Pratchett who says, well, he's talking about
Lord of the Rings. He says, if you're writing a
fantasy novel, and Lord of the Rings is like Mount
Fuji and Japanese painting. It's like, oh, if you're not
talking about it, you're standing on it. And I think
for former Catholics it's the same, like you might not
be talking about Catholicism, but you're standing on it.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, totally if it's not in the frame, yeah, or
that its absence is a specific choice.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
So she goes around. She tells stories, and she tells
how everyone's joining in the union, whether or not this
is true, and how all Irish mothers love their union
sons but not no scabs, and she is soon a celebrity.
The United mind Workers' president said, I don't believe there
is a mine worker from one end of the country
to the other who does not know her name. She

(30:14):
also derided men as not really men if they weren't
union like the essence of masculinity, that she would deride
people with solidarity, and she would like regularly use a
like you're gonna make me a like old lady, do
this instead of you, you fucking coward, piece of shit.
You're not a real man, which is like, I think.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
That's funny, genderous part of the story.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, West Virginia was the impossible state to organize. It's
like one of the most isolated places in the country.
There's like still like not a lot of highways that
go through most of West Virginia and has like the
worst conditions. Actually still there's a ton of people. Like literally,
when you leave my house and you drive past a

(30:54):
spring by the side of the road, there's always trucks
lined up filling up water drugs because a ton of
people who live in West Virginia all over the state
don't have access to running water at home and rely
on public springs.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Wow, I didn't know that, do you.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Hell yeah, I'd read about it before I moved here,
and then I'm just like, oh, yeah, no, there's one
of those, like you know, and the mine owners were
like the most brutal in West Virginia. It was just
like the hardest fucking state, right. Other organizers would go
around quietly to talk to families in secret. Mother Jones
held huge rallies. Like she's kind of cool at this point, right,

(31:32):
she holds huge rallies. She travels with the Mother Jones.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
Band, and I don't know even a music band.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah, wow, I assume it's like you know, it's fucking
eighteen nineties, early nineteen hundred, so it's probably a fucking
marching band.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
It would be a marching band now that we both
met activists, you know, it would be a samba band.
But it's the same.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
You see, I would rather as the marching band. But yeah, no,
not like because samba's worst music. But just when I imagine
the white people traveling around us the band, we're not talking.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
About samba music here, We're not talking about sumber music.
We're talking about the specific samba band that comes on
every left wing march. It's the same people, I'm convinced,
and like it's always just a bit too loud, and
you have to be like yay, yeah them, it would
be them.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, totally. At one point, she was arrested for speaking
in West Virginia and they offered to put her up
in a hotel waiting trial, but she insisted that she
go to jail with her boys, and in court, the
judge called her the most dangerous woman in America. She
loved that, I know, I know, and then she called
the judge scab. But then she later was like, we're

(32:39):
about the same age. We'll be hanging out in heaven
when we're both dead soon.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Was she flirting with this judge?

Speaker 3 (32:46):
Maybe?

Speaker 1 (32:47):
I'm not sure, because like I heard one way that
people talked about being like, oh, she was like basically
saying I'll see you in hell. But then I like
read the actual quote and I was like, no, I'll
see you in heaven, you know, And I'm like, yeah,
all right. I think it was like kind of a
like like right now, and then Wobblei's who call everyone
fellow worker, like still to this day because I guess
I'm one now, but like, you know, because we're kind
of cringey, they'll like call everyone fellow worker. So at

(33:08):
one point a bunch of Wobblis are on trial and
so they're just like calling the prosecutor fellow worker the
whole time.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
I loved that. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Anyway, the judge gave everyone in sixty days in jail,
but suspended her sentence because she was a like old woman.
She leaves West Virginia. She goes to Colorado, where the
Western Federation of Miners were slightly more radical and fighting
are organizing, and soon she's working to recruit people to
the Socialist Party of America much like I'm trying to
recruit you into buying stuff, especially medieval weapons, potatoes. What

(33:42):
have we been sponsored by recently on this show? Really
into the medieval weapons, saying Latin classes.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
And actual medieval weapons.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, why not? Like, let's just be sponsored ones, rubber ones.
Both are fine, they both have their purposes.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Flails are a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah. Well, I've been asking guests recently, like which medieval
weapon would you like us to get a spot answorship from?

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Like?

Speaker 1 (34:00):
What what medieval weapon you here for?

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Catholicism?

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Now, come on a like violent instrum. I see what
you did there? Uh huh uh, all right, I don't
want to be sponsored by Catholicism, but I guess we are.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, let's have a Morning Star.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Okay, that's what everyone picks. They all call it a
flail because it called the coolest name.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, oh, because I used to my story with radical
newspaper starts working for the Morning Stuff. Still the world's
only daily English language communist newspaper. Wow, Or it wasn't
twenty ten.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
It's intentionally named after like this is what Satan's name is? Yes, yeah,
I thought so. That's how you know it's been around
since is what nineteenth century or something.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
I think it's at least one hundred years old.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
That's cool. Well, that's who were sponsored by the Satanic Church.
Here you go, We're back. And now I'm feeling bad
about how I did the ad transition because the State
Tang Church is an actual thing. I just mean, like

(35:05):
both Satan and the Catholic Church. That's who were sponsored by.
We just wanted to cover all our bases.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, we love them.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
So besides coal miners, the main other group that she
wants to organize is well, she wants to organize adults
so that children don't have to work, which is a
good thing to do. She does it in ways that
I'm not convinced are good. In nineteen oh three, she
led the March of the Mill Children from Philly to
the summer home of Roosevelt, the President, and they went

(35:34):
on this like long march where they would stop everywhere
and have these huge shows where the kids were kind
of the entertainment and it was like kids who were
like missing limbs and shit from mine work. At one
point they teamed up with an exotic animal guy to
basically add the kids to his evening circuses like the
kids were then locked in cages during the like circus

(35:55):
while like lions are roaring and shit. And then at
the end she came out and gave it talk about
the evils of child labor. But it was like it
wasn't free. It was people going to the circus and
paying the lion guy.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
This is basically a benefit.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
It's a benefit for the circus.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Americans do this now. It's I don't know. I went
as somebody's date to a like a charity jalla benefit thing,
which we don't have. I think the same in the
funding of like public good works is different. But like
there were a lot of local kids from like a
local theater, which was the thing. That benefit was full.

(36:32):
They just made these little kids get up on stage
and sing little songs about how grateful they were, and
it was I didn't know what to do. It was horrible.
It was really horrible. I just I wasn't a good
date at that thing. I was. It's not the place
where you take someone like me as your date expecting
that I'll behave.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, that's what was happening here. It seems like this
is usually just presented in the like long list of
amazing things Mother Jones did, and I'm like, okay, there's
some theatrics, you know, she does like the theatrical stuff.
Her march started out with like two hundred people. It's
mostly adult too, a long for support and like helping
run it. One by one they dropped out and they
would say shit like I liked working sixty hour shifts

(37:14):
in the mines better than this. I'm being treated horribly.
I'm not putting up with this shit anymore. I sleep outside.
She sleeps in a hotel.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Like, fuck this, She's in her seventies.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
It's true, But here's where you start seeing more of this,
like she's a celebrity and she is like there's two
ways to tell this story and neither one is like
right or wrong. But like, h yeah, no, I get yeah.
I'm like, look, a random thirty year old can sleep outside,
will seven year old sleeps in a hotel. That's fine
by me. But like, if the labor conditions at your

(37:47):
labor march are so bad that everyone's leaving to go
back to work for the minds, you know it's pretty bad, right, yeah, yeah,
not a good sign. Yeah, And I was thinking about
as I was writing this, I was thinking about how
much her lying bothered me, and I was thinking, like,
I'm being too hard on her, you know, because I
was reading how she would write descriptions. She wrote all
these articles. Her first article she ever published actually was

(38:08):
about the horrors of child labor, And I was like,
why has it bothered me so much that she's lying
about this? And then I'm like, well, because she's first
I was thinking, well, she's wolf crying, right. If she
lies about everything, then there's no reason to believe her
political journalism because she will say whatever is politically useful
to her. And so I'm thinking that right as I'm
reading this, and I'm like, yeah, but obviously she's still

(38:29):
not lying about child Let know she was lying about
child labor. In her articles about child labor, she would
just exaggerate how bad it was. Constantly she would exaggerate.
You don't have to lie about child labor to present
it as bad, And you don't have to lie about
Iceland to make it cool. Iceland is cool and child
labor is bad, and the oppression of the Irish people

(38:51):
is real. You don't need to pretend like people were
marching around with heads on spikes of bayonets.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Before fact checking. There is a like the line between
rhetoric and polemic that is entirely unmoored from the reality
based community, and real journalism is fuzzier. Yeah, it takes
a lot to There may not have been the same
assumption as I think we have now, which is good
that anything appearing in a newspaper presenting itself as journalism

(39:18):
will have been checked out.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
I see that. So you're saying that, like the reader
might not have the same expectation of truth.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Mm hmmmm hmm. I'm actually I'm truly not sure, but
there's at least not the same expectation that somebody will
have double checked this. You just have to believe mother Jones,
which I guess is the is the issue.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Right, and historians have checked her and she was lying, right.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, I guess she's writing in an age where it
didn't matter in the same way for the polemic to
be effective if this was true or not.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
But see, that's like the thing that I don't like truthiness.
I don't like the idea of telling people in a
exaggerated evil. I don't think that that's how you build
free thinking people. Agreed, And so I dislike that she
lies about child labor when you can tell the truth
about child labor, because child labor is really bad and

(40:13):
really easy to explain as bad.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
And although I'm just Devil's advocating here, no devil has
more than enough that because as we know, but at
this time, we all know that child labor is very,
very bad. But people one hundred and some years ago
didn't necessarily all operate on that assumption.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
So it's true. Although one of the things that she
would lie about, she would lie and say that labor
was the only people fighting for child labor laws and
stuff like that, right, whereas by and large it was
religious groups and like more like reformers who were doing that.
So she's lying about like other stuff as well. But

(40:54):
that's like kind of a like that's the sort of
lie that it's really easy to fall into. I worry
all the time about what I'm like, and then the
anarchist did everything right, you know, and it's like, well, no,
we didn't.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
The Catholic Church has never done anything good. In Mother
Jones reading, she's not going to let the church.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Have that, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that
her problem, the problem she presented with child labor is
actually different because the church and reformers were presenting a
moral issue where children should get to be children. For
this reason, her argument is more economic. Oh, of course,
her argument is a little bit like it's a little
bit like kids are stealing the jobs.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Oh man, kids go home.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Yeah, like it's it's only a little bit like that.
But she specifically ties it into an economic argument instead
of a moral argument. But I mean it's not wrong, no, yeah, no,
I mean, like whatever, it's the same as like, it's
not the same as but it's comparable to the abolition
of slavery, where it's like, you know, a lot of
people are making economic arguments because they actually cared about

(41:52):
moral arguments, but we're trying to use any argument that
they could make. But to continue onward with our journey
through Mother Jones's time, she tries to go with this
march of children to go see Roosevelt. She's like kind
of like all the time, she's always like, oh, this
President's going to like me, Like this governor is going
to like me, like this may like she just kind
of has this thing where she's always sort of appealing
to authority or I'm looking for that because I dislike

(42:14):
her at this point, right, whatever.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
And you do not like people who want to appeal
to authority. That's very much not your favorite thing at all. Right,
I've met you too.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Yeah, that is a bias that I have. Yeah. So
then one of the other coolest things that she's credited
has having done is that she was one of the
founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, who have
been on this podcast by accident like dozens of times
and on purpose several times because they keep doing cool shit.
They were formed in nineteen oh five and they're like
the most explicitly anti racist union in American history, and

(42:45):
mother Jones's credit is one of the founders. Yeah, so
what happened was, oh no, she showed up to the
first two meetings, was kind of quiet, signed her name
on the thing, and then never went to another meeting again,
and then spent the rest of her time like talking
shit on the IWW never a wobbly She was technically
there at the beginning. Her ideology does not line up
with industrial unionism by and large. Well, she's not anti

(43:08):
industrian unionism, but like it's not her thing. They're too violent,
they're too radical. She doesn't like them, So one of
the things that was in the back of my mind
will like, at least she did the thing, you know,
no now. Instead, in nineteen oh five, she joins the
Socialist Party of America and she spent seven years advocating
for people to join the Socialist Party, which largely split

(43:30):
from the IWW because they were the Socialist Party was
like less revolutionary. They were more interists in politics and
lessened to syndicalism as a means of social change. But
she stayed on the outs of the Socialist Party, which
makes me like her a little bit because she honestly
hated how middle class they were, and she did not
hide her contempt for anyone who was not working class. Right,
She's like, fuck these motherfuckers. She also got in a

(43:50):
fight with a Socialists because she was loaning hundreds of
dollars out to people all the time. Where'd she get
that money? I don't know. I do know where she
got the money. She fund raised it, and then is
like fucking loan sharking it. She's fucking loan sharking the
Socialist Party. So she gets mad because she didn't get
paid back at a timely fashion, and then she's also
mad because the Socialist Party cares about things that she

(44:11):
does not, like open borders, birth control, free love, women's suffrage,
and temperance to be fair fuck temperance, fuck yeah, advocating
that people weren't allowed to drink. She would also try
and bribe Socialist Party officials, and they accused her of
making her fortune as a lecturer. And this is where
I had gotten two hundred pages in the book before
I realized she was a fucking grifter. Yeah. So she's

(44:36):
just going around fundraising and put that shit in her
pocket and occasionally feeding people. And then she looks like
a fucking hero all the time. And she is a
fucking fraud. But she's also a good organizer. But god,
and she expressed most of her anger at other women
in the socialist movement. She didn't come for the middle
class men. Nope, yep.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
I mean, look, that's that's the same as right now.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
I know, that's a story older than time.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Everything everybody hates about the middle class is wrapped up
in themophobia.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
Yeah, that's that's fair.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Look, nobody is hating on all the upper class white
boys I know with their martial arts classes, But we
hate yoga moms for some reason.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
Oh that's a good point, yeah right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Like it's all gendered because women of upper class women
do not have cultural power in quite the same way,
and it's safe to go for them.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah. And also just like I think she's I think
she's kind of a pick me about being a woman,
you know, m So she quits the Socialist Party and
or she's run out of the Socialist Party. Oh and
by the way, in nineteen oh five, she was run
out of the United mind Workers. I forgot about that, God,
And it was over like arguments that she later represented
as being like I didn't like how not radical they were.
But then if you look back at her own statements

(45:48):
at the time, she's like totally kissing ass of the
moderates and like, to.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Be clear, like, I don't know how culturally different America
was one hundred and some years ago, but it would
take a look for me to be involved in running
someone out who was a old lady. Yeah, totally, Like
it runs an old lady out of their movement, the
lady must have done.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Something quite I know, especially as someone whose whole thing
is being.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Like I'm just the old lady.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Yeah, old lady I'm from Ireland, where they put their
heads on spikes. And so she quits and goes back
to union work. She actually rejoins the mine workers, and
she does her thing. She does her unique thing. She
uses fiery rhetoric to sign up workers to strike, while
also lying and turning her back on any actual violence
if it comes to that. In West Virginia, she gave

(46:38):
a speech that goes really hard. They wouldn't keep their
dog where they keep you, fellows. You know that you,
fellows have stood it entirely too long. It is time
now to put a stop to it. We will give
the governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out
of cabin Creek. Here on the steps of the capitol
of West Virginia. I say that if the governor won't
make them go, then we shall make them go. She said,

(47:00):
will not shell.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight.
You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Actually to the Lord.
You ought just to see one old woman who is
not afraid of all the bloodhounds, which is word for cops.
It is freedom or death, and your children will be free.
We are not going to leave a slave class to
the coming generation. And I want to say to you
that the next generation will not charge us for what

(47:24):
we have done. They will charge and condemn us for
what we have left. Undone just a good fucking speaker, YEP.
At the peak of her fame, when all the media
was paying attention to her, after several months dint in jail,
she told the press this is my fuck her quote.
She told the press, one of the most striking things
to me is that gradual dying out of the American type.

(47:47):
In fifty years, the changes in type have been almost
beyond belief. The Japs are not the only Orientals to
be feared. The Hindus will someday make a be a
serious menace. They are coming in large numbers now, although
little has been said about them. And while she organized
with Jews, she referred to them in her autobiography as
lickspittle Jews who had sold out Christ Jesus.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
So okay Jesus, as my family who has symothy. There's
a small community of Northern Irish Jews, and I'm related
to them, and it's a very strange cultural position to occupy.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah, that's true. And then shortly before the Battle of
Blair Mountain, the biggest labor uprising in the US since
again since the Civil War. In nineteen twenty one, she
was afraid that things were going too far, so she
did what she always did. She lied to the workers.
She went to the governor and told them she would
get the workers to go home. She went and told

(48:44):
the workers to disband, said she had a telegram from
the president that if they went home, he'd address their grievances.
The crowd wanted to see the telegram. She wouldn't let them.
They found out she was lying to them and stopped
listening to her. And I'm not totally sure. I think
that's the end of her career, kind of whoa. After
she's called out as a fraud at long last, she

(49:05):
has a nervous breakdown and leaves the coal fields. Then
she writes an autobiography that's entirely fiction in nineteen twenty five,
and in it she praises the West Virginia governor extensively
for like preserving free speech and like because she sucks
up to authority. She moved in with some friends in Maryland,
and she celebrated her fake hundredth birthday on May first,

(49:26):
nineteen thirty and then died at the age of ninety three.
And it's impressive to die at ninety three after celebrating
your hundredth birthday.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah, it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
And that's Mother Jones.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Ninety three is a long, exciting life to live anyway. Again,
don't have to say you're one hundred, I know.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Yeah, ninety three is still pretty good. Yeah, just tell
the truth.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Yeah, you know what, And if it was all she
lied about, if she had lied about her past, yes,
and that was it. Yep, fine, I don't care.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Same same I think you can. You are allowed to
reinvent yourself in ways that do not harm others. I'm very,
very prone that.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Yeah. Yeah, but as soon as you're fucking with the
money and as soon as you're lying to the people
that you're supposed to be organizing and anyway, I just
like this whole time. It started off being like my
working title for a while was like Mother Jones, the
goth hell raiser, who I don't like as much as
I thought I would, And like now it's probably mother

(50:27):
Jones kind of a fraud, to be.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Honest, this has really got to you, It really got
to me. This has really got to you. It's like,
I don't know. I've been thinking as we've been talking about, like, look,
I know we both made a joke about this earlier,
but look, you and me, we're both writers. Neither of
us has either the name or the gender that we
were assigned at birth right, And some of the this

(50:52):
is going to sound incredibly cringed, but some of the
work of being an artist of any kind, a writer
or political thinker in public is a kind of self
mythologization totally.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
And creating a persona.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, it's creating a persona, and that can be I believe,
I hope it can be morally neutral, but it kind
of takes guts to do. And this is why I
remember I did this podcast a year ago. I was
in the middle of a huge depression and you asked me.
When you ask me to you know, what have I
got to plug? I was almost like, oh God, I

(51:25):
don't know if I want people to even look at it.
I wasn't ready to have that be, to do that
persona work anymore. That's been the hardest bit of it. Yeah,
but when it's going well, you do, it's tender because
you know, even if you're saying even if what you're
saying is completely true and real, it's still leaving out

(51:46):
and enough always it's always a little bit of a
fan dance totally, And I guess, I mean, how does
that make you feel about mother Jones?

Speaker 1 (51:58):
I think that's like part of why if she just
stuck to mythologizing herself, if she was like I was
born on May one, eighteen thirty, I'd be like, okay,
you know, or even oh I was involved in this
or that. It gets a little sketchy. Because she's building
clout off of that, and she's using clout for money,

(52:19):
it gets a little sketchyer, but it's once she's just
actually misleading people, you know, Like I don't know, I do.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
You think here's a question, do you think you can
use clout strategically to achieve good political ends? Because that's
something it's very difficult to do right now and everything
is very viable having that persona for the greater good.
Let's say.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
I mean it's interesting, right because it's like almost impossible
to make your living as an artist if you don't
have a platform, right yep. And you can't have a
platform that is not based on a persona because you're
always going to edit. Like, I don't think I lie
about who I am, but I absolutely we don't, Like
I have specific lines. I don't talk about my romantic
relationships or my family to any extensive degree on this show, right,

(53:07):
And I think people probably notice that, or maybe they haven't.
I don't know, but you know, it's like, no, they have.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
I know that because because to your point, there was
a party at my house with some cool young leftists
and cool young trans women, and they independently started talking
about you, and I mentioned that I knew you, and
I think it came up as like, wait, it was
Margaret dating. Nobody can work it out. Yeah, yeah, people

(53:36):
notice and like it's but that's like being a persona. Also,
I'm telling you this because like I hope it will
make you smile, and you will, but also because like
that stuff has reached right.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
And I think that having a platform can be useful.
I think that Mother Jones, even creating celebrity and going
around and being like I'm Mother Jones, can be useful.
I think you do have a higher uh. I think
you have to hold yourself to a higher bar. Yes,
when you do that, And I think that especially when
people are falking with money, I don't trust them. I

(54:12):
have no evidence that she stole money. I have lots
of I mean, she was kind of a lone sharking
and everyone accused her of stealing money. So I'm just
gonna go until she did it because she's dead.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
But like I think, like I think that having persona
and using that strategically should it should make you a
person of more integrity. And at least in my own work,
I've found because I became moderately well known quite young,
I like to think that I would have been that
I would have been, I would have taken care to

(54:40):
be a person of integrity without that. But I absolutely
know that I've had to be a lot more rigorous,
a lot faster than I might otherwise have done. And
maybe it's not the best reason, but at least it's
not like mother Jon's I guess.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
Yeah, or she's amazing and I'm a hater. I don't know, well,
she's a racist, but lots of people have like a
specific thing that they're terrible about. But like, I don't know,
that's pretty.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
I don't think there's an argument there. Yeah, there was
no need for that.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
No, she really kinda left that out and been he realized. Yeah,
but people sure don't talk about that part of what
she has to say, yep, because her continued persona is
whatever anyway. But here we are at the end where
you talk about the things that you do with your
persona platform. Lori Penny, what.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Do I do with my persona platform? I write books
which you can buy from independent bookshops online and in person,
or you could go to the Rainforest site and you
just google my name Laury Penny and they will be there.
My latest one is called Sexual Revolution. I also have
a substack which is just Lori Penny substack. And I'm

(55:52):
also writing for various TV shows at the moment, which
I'm not allowed to talk about, which makes them sound
possibly more exciting than they are. I think they're quite exciting.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Hell yeah, whatever show you were, you, dear listener, are
excited about. Laurie is writing it.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
It's not the queer historical Marx and Angels romance that
we all really desperately want to see. I can tell
you that because nobody will ever, ever ever let me
make it.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Well, that's it for the show and we will talk
to you next week. When we talk about someone who
will probably I'll like them more. I like the average guest,
hope no, I like the guests quite a lot, the
average subject quite a lot. And I'll talk to you
all next week. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Or more podcasts and fool Zone Media, visit our website
fool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, app A podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.