wealthy donors.25 One hundred years ago, what was newsworthy was Mother Jones herself. Cork, Ireland, even held a three-day festival in 2012 to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth.
When Mary Harris Jones was eighty-seven years old, Teddy Roosevelt called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Carl Sandburg once said that the “she” in “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” was a reference to Mother Jones’s unionizing work with Appalachian miners.
As a teenager, Mary moved with her family to North America. In 1867, yellow fever took the lives of her husband and four children. In 1871, she lost a successful dressmaking business to the Great Chicago Fire.
What do you do when twice you have lost everything? Mary Harris Jones became a passionate crusader on behalf of miners, including young children laboring in the mines. In 1903, she organized a Children’s March from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s house in Oyster Bay, New York. Hundreds of children carried banners proclaiming: “We Want to Go to School and Not the Mines!”26
In a meeting that Mother Jones negotiated with John D. Rockefeller Jr., she described conditions in Colorado mines. Rockefeller, a conservationist, was personally moved enough to visit the mines. Rockefeller proceeded to introduce long-needed reforms.
Mother Jones, tireless, indomitable organizer, once said in a labor union meeting: “I asked a man in prison how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.”
Mother Jones died at age ninety three and is buried at a miners’ cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois. She earned her epitaph the day she said, “Whatever the fight, don’t be ladylike.”27
January Notes
1. McClellan, “Lion Kings,” CBS 60 Minutes, no pages.
2. Matthew 6:21.
3. McClure, Pearl in the Storm, 289.
4. Genesis 3:19b.
5. Isaiah 1:18.
6. Detterman, “Worshipping the Triune God,” no pages.
7. Our Rabbi Jesus, “Our Image Stamped,” no pages.
8. Summit, Sum It Up, 369.
9. McDougall, “Hidden Cost of Heroism,” NBC News, no pages.
10. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 200.
11. Lawson, The Story of Ferdinand, no pages.
12. Shakespeare. Sonnet 116.
13. Unam Sanctam Catholicam, “History of Devil’s Advocate,” no pages.
14. Graves, “Dirk Willem Burned,” Christianity, no pages.
15. Matthew 5:43.
16. Historynet, “Seneca Falls Convention,” no pages.
17. The Doctor, directed by Randa Haines.
18. Blanko, “Carl Charles Roberts IV,” Murderpedia, no pages.
19. John 15:13.
20. KLTV, “Amish Grandfather,” no pages.
21. Vitello, “William Niehous Survived,” The Globe and Mail, no pages.
22. Lewis, “Burning the Evidence,” no pages.
23. McCourt, Teacher Man, 1–2.
24. Gooch, “The Numinous,” 113.
25. Mother Jones, “Secret Video,” no pages.
26. America Catholic History Classroom, “Mother Jones,” no pages.
27. AFL-CIO, “Mother Jones,” no pages.
February 1
“Why, what’s the matter, / That you have such a February face, / So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”—William Shakespeare28
Years ago, a part of my job was orienting student chaplains to the hospital world. One thing I did was to have them fill out their own death certificates. That was one way to plunge them into the reality of death in the hospital. Contemplating their own death, they had to fantasize things like how and when it would occur and the name of the next of kin to be notified.
To be a good sport, I also filled out my death certificate. After several years of doing this, it dawned on me that I always chose the first week of February for my death. Why not, I figured, if die I must, die in sync with nature at its coldest, bleakest, and most brutal?
Evidently Februaries across the big pond, at least in Shakespeare’s time, were much like Februaries where I live—“full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.” A February face is a pale face, deprived of Vitamin D, “full of frost.” A February face is a sad face, possibly expressing Seasonal Affective Disorder, sculpted by long nights and cloudy, rainy, icy, or snowy days, and punctuated with too few doses of light. A February face is a long, ground-down face that cries out: “How long, O Lord, how long?”
When we get older, we are more attuned (one would hope) to the impermanence of all things, including Februaries. That may be the hardest part of being young. When we are young and flunk the big test or fail to make the team or get the job or get dropped by the object of our affection or go blank when making a speech and make a total fool of ourselves, it is hard for a while to think we will ever be whole or feel good again. We may even wonder if going on is worth the trouble.
Might you have a February face? If you can hang on just a little longer, change you can believe in—courtesy of Mother Nature—is on the way.
February 2
Diversity in some circles is a dirty word, especially when universities or churches make it the value that dominates all others.
The word stirs positive feelings in me whenever I pass a poster in the foyer of a local elementary school. This is how the poster defines the word: Different Individuals Valuing Each other Regardless of Skin Intellect Talents Years. How could people of good will not value diversity defined this way?
I particularly like the four differences the poster singles out not to be de-valued:
Skin. Please do not disparage me because of my extremely pale, sun-damaged skin. I had no control over the skin my parents’ English and Irish genes passed to me. And please do not be too critical of me for permanently damaging my skin with sunburns when I was young. I did it out of ignorance, just like those today who ignorantly are damaging their skin in tanning booths.
Intellect. Please do not discount me because of my IQ. Most of my intelligence quotient was determined before I was born. I am responsible only for how I play the finite hand I was dealt.
Talents. Please do not dismiss me for not having the skills of professional athletes or mathematicians, sales persons or politicians, electricians or mechanics, artists or musicians. My DNA did not equip me, constitutionally and temperamentally, for those particular skills.
