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The magazine Mother Jones made big news in 2012 because it released a surreptitiously recorded and damaging conversation presidential candidate Mitt Romney had with 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