And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.)
“Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Margaret C. Anderson
Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way.
Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes, and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a well-informed one. She has read a lot—chiefly history and economics. She hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions. Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the “damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.” Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough men she spends her life among.
The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time, but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing, but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful. She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is almost quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.”
That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my boys, stick together. Solidarity is the only method by which we can beat the system.”
Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against itself,” as she says—and says untruly.
On the whole she is just what you would have expected—except that she’s more amusing. There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is imaginative in the large way a child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child in the sense a grown-up can’t be without losing a lot.