Tag: labor unions

Happy Birthday Hellraiser

Happy Birthday Hellraiser

The long call of a spring robin woke me from a dream about Mother Jones. She was organizing my group to protest the nightmarish abolition of women’s rights, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. 

“I don’t march anymore. I can’t run!” I muttered in half-sleep.

I tugged to escape her visitation as I was tugging the covers to get up and contemplate the robin’s daybreak anthem. The common backyard robin is unusual along the Lake Michigan shoreline where I live. Its song is one of the few teachings I remember from my own mother. 

I’d been to a Mother Jones birthday party at the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones, born in County Cork in 1837, immigrated when she was ten years old. Her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867. Four years later her dress-making shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Undaunted, this fierce, five-foot-tall Irish American became an organizer for workers’ rights, particularly the United Mine Workers.

On May 1, 1886, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday which led to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones declared her birth date as May 1, to honor the Haymarket Martyrs. Her exact birthday is unknown. Most records of peasants born in western and southern Ireland were lost or destroyed during the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852). This is true of my own ancestry. 

Mother Jones helped coordinate major strikes in the coal mines and on the railroads where my great-grandfather and great-uncles worked. Her protest marches included children who wore banners saying, “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” They could easily have been my relatives.

Women activists belittled her lack of commitment to women’s suffrage.  She said “you don’t need the vote to raise hell!”  Jones believed it was more important to advocate for the working class—black, white, men, women and children—than to support women’s causes alone.

Like Mother Jones’ family, my father’s forebearers were discriminated against due to their immigrant status, their Catholic faith, and their Irish heritage. The shame of the Irish hung heavy in their Kentucky and Indiana homes. But still, my father, fresh out of law school in the late 1930s, working for the United Mine Workers, wrote the first union pension legislation in the United States.  And, family lore supposes his father, my grandfather, was a union organizer on the railroad.

When Mary Harris Jones turned 60, she began calling herself “Mother” Jones. She dressed in matronly black, wore old-fashioned hats and referred to the laborers she helped as “her boys.”

When I was 60, I took up offense for workers in my office. Wage inequality, discordant work assignments, and unfair discipline reeked of cruelty. In the end, I got canned, but their jobs were secured. 

Like the robin wake-up call at dawn, Mother Jones calls from the graveyard and wakes me to the oppressed and wronged.

I bow to her. In gratitude.

Happy Birthday Mother Jones.

The Boilermaker

Bridget Flynn and Michael Burke were born somewhere in the west of Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845-1849. They may have married in Ireland and emigrated to Earlington, Kentucky, or they may have emigrated with their families, met and married later. Or they may never have married at all. I’ve found birth records for two children, Wiliam A. Burke, my grandfather born in 1882 and Mary Agnes Burke, my great-aunt who was a nun at St. Ceceilia’s Academy in Nashville for her entire adult life. 

The next generation of the Burkes, Flynns and other Irish immigrants moved up and out of the mines to work for the railroad.

My grandfather listed “boilermaker, RR” on all official documents, even when he registered for the WWII draft at age 59. He married Katherine Kilroy in 1916, moved to Terre Haute, Indiana where she died in a car accident leaving him with three children under the age of four. 

The motherless Burke children, including my father, moved into the Kilroy family home with their maternal grandparents, seven aunts, and two uncles. In the early twentieth century, Terre Haute, a railroad town on the Wabash River, sat in the largest coal-producing county in the US. The crossroads entertainment included beer halls full of hustlers, alcoholics, floozies, grifters, drifters, desperadoes, and high-stakes gamblers. 

Will Burke 1950s

My grandfather worked up and down the Louisiana and Nashville line and often arrived at dawn to visit his children in Terre Haute, for a few hours before hopping back on the afternoon train. It’s been said he was a railroad union organizer and had to be constantly on the move for fear of reprisals from the L & N Railroad’s anti-union thugs. These were the years leading up to the passage of the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which required railroad companies to allow collective bargaining, making it illegal to wage war against their union-organizing employees.

Terre Haute’s most famous citizen, Eugene V. Debs, five-time American presidential candidate, and leader of the Socialist Party of America, had worked on the railroad in the 1870s and became active in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman. Debs led the Brotherhood in a major strike in1888 before founding the American Railway Union. 

I have a hunch the family lore about my grandfather’s underground union organizing was greatly influenced by hometown hero Eugene Debs. I met my grandfather once or twice but hardly remember him. The death certificate says he died of a heart attack, “In Penn. RR car somewhere between Indianapolis and Richmond Indiana.”

My father’s generation anglicized their Irishness to fit into white middle class America. He was ashamed of his working-class immigrant heritage. But he took care of those family coal miners and railroad workers—as a young lawyer he worked for John L. Lewis, president of the United Mineworkers and wrote the first pension plan ever negotiated for American labor.