‘The Angel of The Mines’ by Nora Gillispie from The Socialist and Labor Star (Huntington, West Virginia). Vol. 2 No. 1. May 30, 1912.

Seventy-three years ago there fled from Ireland a political refugee, with a little girl of eight, taking refuge in the land of freedom. Thus the spirit of rebellion and revolt is the heritage of the most noted and talked-of woman in the U.S. today. Mother Jones has stood for so many years as the very incarnation of aggressive and fighting labor, that it is very hard to picture her as a school teacher, and as a busy wife and mother fulfilling her domestic duty in the home. Yet she was all of these. She had a good education and taught school for several years before she married a worker, a staunch union man, and she, soon began organizing other workingmen’s wives into an auxiliary realizing even at that early stage the value of organization for the workers whether they be men or women.

Four children were born to her in rapid succession, and the wives of workingmen will understand what her life was for six years, when the great tragedy took place, which changed her from the mother of four to the mother of the working class.

An epidemic broke out in the town where she lived and in the space of seven days she saw death take from her one after another, her husband and four children. It was overwhelming and the average woman would have succumbed utterly. But not Mother Jones of the great heart and rebellious spirit. All the love, devotion and self-sacrifice she would have bestowed upon her own dear ones became transmuted into a declaration for the cause of labor. Here is heroism for you in comparison with which DYING for a cause seems insignificant. To determine to LIVE for a cause, when your own life is shattered and your whole being pleads-that is the very flower of heroism.

Since that time the story of Mother Jones has been the story of the labor war that goes on and must go on in every country where workers are exploited to make profit for shirkers, and always has she taken her place on the firing line. Neither the bullpen nor the jail have held any terrors for her and she known the inside of both.

“The Angel of the Mines” has other names, one of which is “the old she-devil,” which the owners of the earth and the fullness thereof apply to her. This is a good example of the difference in classes.

Begun in 1912, the Socialist and Labor Star (later just Labor Star) was published in Huntington, West Virginia as “the official organ of the Socialist Party and of the Huntington Trades & Labor Assembly” and edited by Wyatt Thompson, West Virginian and former coal miner then printer’s apprentice. Labor issues, including the UMWA strike in Paint and Cabin Creeks, as well as US foreign policy, religion, and local political affair were features of the paper. It was often at odds with both the leadership of the Socialist party and of the UMWA. In the beginning of 1915, the Socialist and Labor Star merged with the Charleston Labor Argus to form the Argus Star, Thompson continued to serve as editor of the Argus Star.

Access to full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85059765/1912-05-31/ed-1/seq-1/