Mother Jones in Barre
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Toolbox
By Paul Heller - Published: September 3, 2010
In April 1914, the legendary Mother Jones braved snowstorms in the Northeast to support a strike by retail clerks in Barre. She took lodging on North Main Street at The Hotel Barre and was entertained by union cohorts including Silvio Cardi of the Barre Central Labor Union and Progressive Party stalwart Fred Suitor of the International Quarry Workers Union. Five hundred men and women from Barre, Graniteville and Websterville assembled at the Barre Opera House to hear the “Miner’s Angel” defend the clerks’ strike which had been under way in Barre since early spring. Although Mother Jones had come to Barre to support a strike, she left town having strengthened the commitment to socialism of a future mayor of the Granite City, Fred Suitor.
Born Mary Harris in Ireland in 1836, she came to America as a child with her father and married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders’ Union. Her husband and children died in a yellow fever epidemic and, shortly after, her dressmaking shop burned in the Chicago fire. In the 1870s she found solace as an advocate for the laboring classes and as a union organizer, primarily among miners. Her white-haired, grandmotherly presence became synonymous with the labor movement and, as a consequence, she became a favorite of newspapers and magazines.
A reporter for the Barre Times noted that she appeared energetic despite her nearly 80 years, rapidly walking up and down the platform while delivering her short, straight-from-the-shoulder sentences. “Hers is a martial spirit and it seemed to be contagious ... The retail shop owners (Mother Jones referred to as ‘ten-cent store magnates’) required girls and women to arrive at their places of business at 6 and 7 o’clock in the morning and work until 9 o’clock at night on weekdays and until 10 o’clock on Saturday – all for a weekly salary of $6.00. Querulously, Mrs. Jones asked if the merchants would allow their daughters to work in what she called slave pens for $6 a week.” “And use the profits for erecting buildings so high,” Mother Jones averred, “that the Almighty cannot see the deviltry that is going on below.”
“It is organized labor in Barre,” she continued, that has made the exploitation possible. “Without the patronage of union men the merchants would be looking elsewhere to hang out their signs. In dealing with some aspects of the present labor difficulty as they affect the women members of the clerks’ union, the speaker paid eloquent tribute to the part that women have played in a good many working class struggle,” noted the reporter. She also displayed her dismissive attitude toward the courts that disregarded the rights of labor, “No one could ever hire me to say ‘Your Honor’ to a capitalist judge,” said Mother Jones, “for I am too painfully aware that judiciary hirelings are wholly without honor.”
Her activism brought her into conflict with the law and she suffered many arrests and imprisonments but continued to bedevil the enemies of labor — nowhere more stridently than in the Ludlow, Colo., coalfields. In a letter to Fred Suitor of Barre’s Quarry Workers Union she acknowledges that the tragedy of Ludlow was never far from her mind. Hired thugs there had sprayed machine gunfire on a tent city of striking miners and murdered women and children to deter the organization of a coal miners union. Her letter begins “My dear Comrade:” and instructs the Barre union man on the essential power of the rank and file. She then decries the bureaucrats that run the nation’s unions. “They are coming to Washington now on a peace mission. Why did they not go to Washington when the babes were burnt on the altar of commercialism in Colorado?” She continues on a more personal note to Suitor, “I wanted to have much more time with you, while in Barre than I did have. There is a great deal that you can do for the party, in future advancement, if you were clear on its position.”
Suitor began his working life at the age of eight in a Quebec copper mine. He was 12 when his family moved to Barre and he secured work as a tool boy in the quarries. It is likely that he was receptive to Mother Jones’s message, particularly her opposition to child labor.
The letter contains great passion, as well as another glimpse of anger at the functionaries employed by organized labor:
“The majority of those who are drawing salaries, dictating the policies have never in their lives been in the trenches. But in spite of all their dictatorship, there will arise a movement, with a clear philosophy of the class struggle, and no leeches will be allowed to live off of it.”
Finally, on borrowed letterhead and posted from the Atlantic Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 24, 1915, she concludes with Christmas wishes for Fred Suitor and her customary closing:
”Yours loyally to the end for the cause,”
Mother Jones’ new protégé, union organizer Fred Suitor, was later to be elected mayor of Barre for two terms (1929-1931) as a candidate of the Socialist Party.
Historian Paul Heller is a retired librarian and a contributor to Vermont Magazine. He lives in Massachusetts. A copy of Mother Jones’s letter to Fred Suitor is held in the archives of the Aldrich Public Library.
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