Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman (2007) (review)

[Errata*]

This gritty documentary about the union agitator Upton Sinclair called the “living wrath of God” contains the only existing “live” footage of Mother Jones. The 47-second medium close-up captures a great American orator speaking with the lilting cadence of righteous indignation, grown faint, on her “honorary” 100^th birthday: “You know I am considered a Bolshevik, and a red, and an IWW [International Workers of the World], and a radical, and I admit to being all they’ve charged me with. I’m anything that would change this moneyed civilization to a higher and grander civilization for the ages to come. . . .”

Some thirty years earlier, around 1900, a widowed dressmaker in her 60s named Mary Jones transformed herself into a firebrand and entered American history as Mother Jones. The power of her voice could mobilize mining camps: “If I can be out there facing bayonets and guns, then you can. I can’t believe you’re so cowardly. If you’re afraid to go out there and confront your pitiful little bosses . . . then you don’t deserve to have women living among you.”

Front page news in her day, today, few outside of organized labor know Mother Jones. Mother Jones presents a darker, less known version of labor history that has survived mainly through folklore. Woody Guthrie’s “Ludlow Massacre” (written in 1944), for example, memorialized the tragedy, which the film recalls through archival photos. In 1914, troops fired upon and burned a tent city erected by striking miners in Colorado, killing 13 women and children. The segment includes a 10-second clip of mounted troops at Ludlow, courtesy of the United Mine Workers of America. Labor activists supplied the filmmakers, Feurer and Vazquez, much of their archival material. “That there was no profit incentive in the project,” said Vazquez, “was a factor in their willingness to share this material.”

Their best find, the Mother Jones footage--owned by a retired miner--came from a lead. The find compelled Feurer and Vazquez to make Mother Jones, which started as a seven-minute segment of another documentary, Remember Virden (still in production). “We thought she deserved her own piece, and the segment grew to 15, and finally 24 minutes,” said Vazquez. The film’s unplanned birth explains the use of only one historian, Elliot J. Gorn, author of Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. Gorn’s enthusiasm is evident on-camera as he explains that a prosecuting attorney in West Virginia pinned the “most dangerous” label on Jones during her trial for violating a strike injunction in 1903: “There, your honor, sits the most dangerous woman in America. She crooks her little finger and 5000 contented men walk off of their jobs.” This was not a foolish remark, said Gorn. “She was dangerous. She could bring out the fire in workers.”

Jones’ appropriation of the most respected and sacred title of the Victorian world, “mother” was an act of genius, said Gorn. “There was no Mother Jones. There was a woman called Mary Harris who married a man named Jones. We will never know Mary Jones, but we know that she wanted to be someone else.” Born in 1837 in Country Cork, Ireland, Jones added seven years to her age and claimed May 1—International Workers Day—as her birthday. “Mother Jones had a history,” states Gorn. “Mary Harris and Mary Jones did not. Her life was about taking rage and making something with that.”

The contours of Jones’ previous life are vague. In 1859, she taught at a convent in Monroe, Michigan for $8 a month. In 1860, she opened a dress making shop in Chicago. In 1861, in Memphis, she married an iron molder. Jones’ autobiography recalls the yellow fever epidemic of 1867: “One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. No...