American Experience

(mine carts creaking on tracks)

RONALD LEWIS

In most cultures where there are coal miners, middle class people and above think they're animals, literally. And they treat them that way, and they know that. So what they do is reverse that matter, and they take pride in the fact that they can actually survive in such a place. That makes them hard, and they stand on their own, and they don't care what the public thinks. (horn blowing)

NARRATOR

Strangers rarely found their way into the coal camps of southern West Virginia. So when a matronly older woman walked into a camp one fall morning in 1901, the local storekeeper was curious. He invited her in and asked her who she was and what was her business in town. The answer appeared to unnerve him. She was the notorious Mother Jones, there to convince the coal miners in the area

to join her union

the United Mine Workers of America-- the UMW.

JAMES GREEN

Whenever somebody came down, like Mother Jones, to talk to people there about, you know, the union, they'd be run out of town by men with shotguns.

DOUG ESTEPP

Southern West Virginia was an industrial police state, more or less. The operators or owners did not want anyone who had union sympathies or was interested in bringing the union into their camps to be there.

NARRATOR

The president of the UMW had apologized in advance for sending Jones on this mission. Some union officials thought it was a lost cause. While men in the northern coalfields had scratched and clawed to bring their union into being over the previous ten years, miners in southern West Virginia had been beaten down by the mine owners, whose power in the state was virtually unchecked. Mother Jones quickly found out what workers were up against. Private guards hired by the coal operators waved guns in her face and threatened to kill anyone who passed out handbills advertising a meeting about the union. But Jones insisted she could succeed where nobody else had.

ROSEMARY FEURER

West Virginia might be this backwater place to most people, but for her, she sees it as a place of resistance and a place that she wants to be part of a fight. Whenever there was a struggle, Mother Jones was there. She said, "I have no home except where there is struggle."

NARRATOR

Mary Harris Jones had been driven from her native Ireland by the potato famine when she was a teenager, then watched her husband and four children die during a yellow fever epidemic just after the Civil War. After she lost her dressmaking business in the Great Chicago Fire, she remade herself as the nation's most unlikely labor organizer. All through that winter and into the spring thaw, the 65-year-old Jones kept up what she called "weary tramps through the dead of night," selling West Virginia miners on the idea of union.

THOMAS ANDREWS

The basic impetus behind the union movement was the idea that by providing some sort of collective way for workers to bargain, to present their grievances, the unions could give workers strength, could sort of muster the strength of individuals and give them a way of standing up against these enormous corporations that were becoming ever more powerful.

NARRATOR

Jones challenged West Virginians to stop acting like "cringing serfs" and to commit to the UMW. She was loud, she was profane, and she was demanding.

DENISE GIARDINA

The miners loved it. They loved seeing this little old lady just out there kicking butt basically, and cussing and carrying on. And she was saying that they had something to stand up for and to fight back.

FEURER

She was speaking in social revolutionary terms. "These towns are ours. "These mines are ours. You really deserve to own these mines." That's what she would say. She does communicate a kind of motherly love that says, "Why are you letting yourself be abused? Aren't you better than this?"

NARRATOR

"This whole place is stirred up," Jones reported to UMW headquarters. "Six months ago, these men were afraid to look at me. "Today, they are realizing they are men and have some rights on this earth." (rain pattering) Mother Jones could not have known it that spring, but she had sparked a fight that would escalate over the next 20 years from an unremarkable skirmish between capital and labor to the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. (rapid gunfire) Mother Jones, her followers, and her antagonists would turn the coalfields of southern West Virginia into a blood-soaked warzone where basic constitutional rights and freedoms were violently contested.

GREEN

The story of the West Virginia mine wars is a profoundly American story of people's belief in the principles of the founding fathers. What these people were fighting for was the rights that they thought their government had guaranteed them and had been denied them.

BEVERLY GAGE

The right to free assembly, the right to free speech, and the idea that just because you worked for someone shouldn't mean that that person had a kind of tyrannical control over you, but that you as a worker had certain democratic rights as well.