Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, c1902 November 4. (Library of Congress)
An excerpt from the book
Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn:
Her contemporaries marveled at her. “She is a wonder,” the poet Carl Sandburg wrote of Mother Jones during World War I. “Close to 88 years old and her voice a singing voice; nobody else could give me a thrill just by saying in that slow, solemn, orotund way, ‘The kaisers of this country are next, I tell ye.’” Clarence Darrow, America’s greatest trial lawyer of the early twentieth century, wrote that “her deep convictions and fearless soul always drew her to seek the spot where the fight was hottest and the danger greatest.” The feminist author Meridel Le Sueur was only fourteen years old when she first heard Mother Jones speak, but she never forgot it: “I felt engendered by the true mother, not the private mother of one family, but the emboldened and blazing defender of all her sons and daughters.”
President Calvin Coolidge and "Mother" Jones, 1924 Sept. 26. (Library of Congress)
