Mother Jones and the Graveyard of Labor History A journey to understand the real Mother Jones and the contradictions of labor union membership

Mother Jones, icon of radical labor, had been out in the Union Miners Cemetery earlier but now was standing on a fake dynamite box, giving ‘em hell outside city hall in Mt. Olive, Illinois.

“Doesn’t matter what race, creed, gender, or political banner you stand under,” she shouted in an imagined Cork accent. “We’re all laborers and work in this fight together. The unions have helped establish the middle class. They’ve ended child labor…they obtained health and safety standards, fair wages, equality, and justice!”

The modern—even intersectional—language was tuned to our time, and someone behind me in the street said, “It’s too bad it didn’t turn out that way!” I turned and saw a tall trans woman with a colorful parasol and little dog on a leash.

Mother Jones spoke for another minute then said, “Now join me for food, fun, and celebratin’, for everyone from one to 194. Thank you!”

The occasion for her rising was the Third Annual International Mother Jones Festival, held May 5, 2024, the handiest date to May Day, when the real Mother Jones chose to celebrate her birthday. (The “194” was a nod to her claim to have been born in 1830, though she was born seven years later.) It is also the 125^th anniversary year of the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive, “the first and only union cemetery in the United States, founded by the United Mine Workers of America,” said speaker Joann Condellone, founding member of the Mother Jones Museum in Mt. Olive and of the Perpetual Care Association of the cemetery.

For decades at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones made tremendous efforts to organize working-class people for industrial and human rights, demonstrating great physical courage, fortitude, and a mesmerizing gift for oratory. Jones asked to be buried in Mt. Olive with “her boys,” the union miners who had died in a labor clash in nearby Virden, Illinois, in 1898. She died in 1930 at the age of 93.

“You’ve no one! You’ve got to be brave!” The grave and monument of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Mt. Olive, Illinois. (Photo by John Griswold)

The cemetery was founded to bury those men after a Mt. Olive church refused them as “murderers.” It is also the burial place of “General” Alexander Bradley—an English immigrant, coal miner, and union activist who led the Virden clash—recognizable in photos for his silk top hat, Prince Albert coat, and umbrella. At the festival, he could be seen selling pulled-pork sandwiches and hamburgers at a table at the curb.

Macoupin County, which holds Virden and Mt. Olive, has other important labor sites. But Mother Jones’s grave and two-story granite monument on the outskirts of Mt. Olive might be seen to mark a split in the soul of working-class America that is still evident in our nation’s division.

•  •  •

Labor scholar John Laszlett says that by 1919, when Mother Jones was still speaking across the country, UMWA District 12 (then the state of Illinois) “had become the largest and most powerful, as well as the most radical, district union in the United Mine Workers as a whole.”

But as communications scholar Steve Martin says, “Throughout American history, two distinct ideas have dominated the organization of labor. One has attempted to use the labor movement to transform society into ‘some form of cooperative commonwealth.’ The other—a far more limited view of organized labor’s role focused primarily on the ‘bread‐and‐butter’ issues of hours, wages, and working conditions. [T]hese two approaches historically have caused division and tension within the American labor movement.”

By the 1930s, union miners in District 12 had split into two factions, one hoping to negotiate with business by means of a hierarchical organization—John L. Lewis’ UMWA and CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations)—and those in the Progressive Miners of America, founded in 1932 in Macoupin County, who looked to community-based unionism meant to be “democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent.” The two groups clashed bitterly, sometimes violently; the UMWA’s business unionism won.

But the “bread-and-butter” versus “cooperative commonwealth” split endures in our politics, and Mother Jones, a radical socialist who once brought many working-class (and other) people together in solidarity, is buried in what is now one of the reddest counties in Illinois.

Handbill on display in the Illinois Coal Museum. (Photo by John Griswold)

I have long been interested in how communities once accused of being communist “reds” in Mother Jones’s time—such as the coal town where I grew up—turned Reagan-red then MAGA-red. Only 35 percent of Republicans now “have a positive view of labor unions,” the Pew Research Center says, and even some union members, as I found in St. Louis in 2018, are voting against the Democratic Party—something once unthinkable in places such as Mt. Olive. I drove an hour up I-55 from St. Louis for the Mother Jones festival, which I was told might have only 50 attendees, to see if there was any detectable dissonance.

•  •  •

The Mayor of Mt. Olive and others made brief remarks; later there would be live music. But first Mother Jones got back on her dynamite box, accompanied by a man dressed in old-time miner clothes and wraparound shades. It was a little uncanny to see Jones—the historical re-enactor Loretta Williams in an outfit she sews herself—speaking to the small crowd a few blocks from where the real Mother Jones is buried, but more so to hear her preaching militant mutual aid on a street in small-town America.

“We’ve got to keep fightin’ or there’s no hope for any of us,” Williams cried. “And if some of us get riled up, well, we have to be riled up. If we don’t, who’s going to stand for us? We can’t do this by ourselves, not just one person. There’s strength in numbers. Show me your muscles, men! Show me your muscles. Come on!”

“Riled up” was safe-place gentle compared to the armed resistance Mother Jones often preached. But Loretta Williams knows how to aim for her audience’s emotions.

“Any chance they get, they’re gonna rob ya blind,” she said to applause. “You know those politicians, they coming up to ya, lookin’ ya in the eye, shaking your hand, and with their other hand they’re pickin’ your pocket!”

She had to shout over applause and cries of Yeah! “They’re pickin’ your pockets, they’re going to keep you poor, and they’re gonna keep ya in [wage] slavery. You’ve got ta keep fightin’! Just like we did 150 years ago. […] Stand together in solidarity!”

Applause and whoops. The miner re-enactor shouted, “My god, Mother, if you can’t fight for yourself, who can you fight for?”

“You’ve no one!” she shouted back. “You’ve got to be brave! You’ve got to have courage! If a man who works day and night can’t afford to support his family, what kind of dignity can you have? […] The slave in the cave, that’s what you were, just a coal miner that would crawl in there, like a cockroach. They treated you like cockroaches! […] But you’re brave. You have courage. And you stand together in solidarity with the rest of us union laborers. I’m proud of ya!”

Applause was thinner at the second mention of slavery, of roaches, the union, and the specific labor of coal mining, which few there had ever done. Williams slipped into the historical moment.

“[At] the Virden Massacre they died for the eight-hour workday, when those [nonunion Black] men [and their families] came in on the train and were going to take over [the jobs of striking union miners], and our boys [many of them armed] were out there waiting, gonna prevent that train from stoppin’, and what happened? There were [hired White] guards on that train. Guards, armed with brand-new…Winchesters, and when that train slooowwed down, THEY STARTED FIRIN’ AT OUR BOYS, THEY GUNNED THEM DOWN, THEY HAD THOSE BRAN’-NEW REPEATIN’ RIFLES, our boys never stood a chance, not a chance, and after 10 minutes that train pulled out…and General Bradley said, ‘Call for a doctor! Call for a doctor!’” Her voice cracked. “But it was too late! It was too late for so many of them!”

These were the “martyrs” of Virden, who died for a “holy cause,” said Mother Jones, who frequently used tropes of religion and crusades in her union rhetoric. The “Battle of Virden” or “Virden Massacre” (local historians argue the terms) was one of at least four such events in Illinois where mine owners brought in trainloads of Black “scab” miners to replace striking union miners, whose ranks included “native” (American-born White) miners; Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Lithuanian, and other foreign-born union miners often not considered “White”; and Black union miners. Coal operators used Black and immigrant nonunion miners to try to create division in union ranks.

Re-enactor Loretta WIlliams, as Mother Jones, outside City Hall in Mt. Olive, Illinois, May 5, 2024. (Photo by John Griswold)

Labor scholar Rosemary Feurer, who will publish a book in 2025 called The Mother Jones Road Trip Through Illinois Labor History (University of Illinois Press), writes, “The question of racial inclusion in the UMWA was [also] a field of battle. Despite the radicalism of the miners, black miners continued to be excluded with the complicity of the miners union. [T]he ‘Victory at Virden,’ as the miners termed it, was marred by the vicious racial conflict that was also a legacy of these events. Soon after 1898, Virden and Pana became ‘sundown’ towns, and African-American unionized miners were threatened despite the UMWA’s official integrated status.”

Black unionists who were at Virden were purposely left out of the histories and commemorations in order to simplify the narrative, Feurer told me by email.

Complexity makes it difficult to package history for daytrippers. We gather to admire a figure and invite the question: “Where do we stand in relation to what that person believed in, and who that person really was?”

•  •  •

Amy (not her name), the trans woman who had said, “It’s too bad it didn’t turn out that way,” had, it turned out, been talking with someone about her T-shirt, not the state of the world. It was just a lucky accident she was at the festival, she told me. She had driven out from the Indianapolis area on a whim because Mother Jones’s activism was “pretty cool.” She was walking in the Miners Cemetery when Mother Jones herself walked up and invited her to the festival kickoff downtown.

“I don’t think they were expecting a trans person here today,” she said and laughed.

She was an organizer, she said, but that was not her job; she was “just a worker.” She told me she had had to ask her bosses not to send her to certain areas around Indy because of Moms for Liberty and Klan activity. On the drive to Mt. Olive she had seen black-striped American flags, which she said were symbols “adjacent to” the far-right Three-Percenter militia movement that meant, “Give no quarter to those who you feel are a threat.” For her, this landscape was a mortal threat.

I asked Amy what she admired most about Jones and how she thought those ideas might be brought into action today. Did Amy consider Mother Jones a good feminist, for instance?

Jones gathered people in protest when many thought it was not a woman’s place to do so, and subverted beliefs about matronly behavior to do it. She sacrificed nearly everything for what she believed was the greater good and worked tirelessly for women and children in the context of the labor struggle.

But as Jones’s biography on the National Women’s History Museum website says, “Despite her radicalism, Jones did not support women’s suffrage, arguing that ‘you don’t need a vote to raise hell.’ She pointed out that the women of Colorado had the vote and failed to use it to prevent the appalling conditions that led to labor violence. […] Jones argued that suffragists were naïve women who unwittingly acted as duplicitous agents of class warfare. Although Jones organized working class women, she held them in auxiliaries, maintaining that—except when the union called—a woman’s place was in the home.”

Mother Jones Museum in Mt. Olive, Illinois, City Hall (Photo by John Griswold)

Mother Jones also liked powerful men, such as Woodrow Wilson and John D. Rockefeller Jr., and was sometimes naively flattered by them, and as Elliott Gorn, author of the definitive biography on Jones, says, her “Autobiography fails to mention prominent women in labor or politics [such as Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Jane Addams], much as [she] failed to acknowledge them throughout her career.”

“She never even found a way of expressing the injustice of less-than-competent men serving as high union officials while she, with her intelligence, ability, and ambition, was kept out,” he writes.

“That was a different time,” we have learned to say, but our time also often demands purity of intent. Amy took the lack of intersectionality lightly, however. She said that in today’s identity terms, Jones would likely get called racist and other things, but that Mother once told some politician or captain of industry he had a small dick.

“How could it get more feminist than that?” she said and laughed.

•  •  •

Helaine Silverman and I rode a little bus to the cemetery for the wreath-laying and more speeches. Dr. Silverman is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Director of CHAMP (Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy), and Codirector of the Mythic Mississippi Project, at the University of Illinois. She has long worked in Mt. Olive.

The Mythic Mississippi Project was “inspired by the issue of under-exploitation of cultural heritage resources in the state,” the project’s website says. “Our project focus is largely downstate where we are seeking to develop multiple regional-level tourism trails that will link local towns according to particular heritage themes. The project moreover seeks to ‘layer’ cultural heritage trails in particular towns…so as to achieve ‘attraction density’ and thus promote visitation.”

Dr. Helaine Silverman, professor at the University of Illinois and co-director of the Mythic Mississippi Project, stands with a historical sign her unit erected in the Union Miners Cemetery. (Photo by John Griswold)

Silverman told me “the premise of the [Project’s] grant was that there were towns that had lost their industrial base and were in severe economic decline but that had very interesting histories,” and the Project hoped to “work with towns to deploy that history, feature it, and enhance it through historical markers or programs or murals or a website…and that a little bit of tourism could have a little economic perk.”

One of the heritage themes is “coal history, labor history,” which was “working out really well,” she said. In nearby Gillespie, “[W]e’ve already had bus tours [and] an educational program, where I recorded a lecture…. [A] curator of the coal museum…gives very good tours…including to the school teachers who are getting credit….”

She said she is the “niche” audience for this activity: “What should we do with the kids on a Saturday? [S]omething historic that they could see and that would be both educational but induce somebody to buy a cup of coffee in a town or have lunch in town, or a town might make T-shirts for itself and sell them.”

She added, “And the other thing that’s been interesting is reaching out to towns where we think we could help, and they’re not interested. And that’s been fascinating.”

“One of the most interesting,” she said, was the town of Benld [“Ben-eld”], between Mt. Olive and Gillespie. “[I]t was the first town we approached when we got the grant, and we said, ‘This town is underlain by mining tunnels, and basements are collapsing, and you were once this boomtown. There were multiple dialects of Italian that were spoken on the street. It was known as the wickedest town in America—there were bars, there were brothels, there were food co-ops; it was really alive, and the mines closed and the town declined. And it really, really declined.’

“[T]here is a historic connection with Al Capone, [and] we said, ‘We’ll help you create a street fair, we’ll put up brown and white street signs under your ordinary green and white signs, so, you know, we’ll have Prohibition Way and Amendment 18 Street and Roaring 1920s Avenue, and everything,’ and the city council listened, turned around, went back to the meeting, and [were] just totally disinterested, and I think it’s not the story they want to tell about the town. And it’s really funny because Mt. Olive is really taking advantage, Gillespie’s taking advantage, and here’s Benld between the two that has something interesting that could help and they just don’t want it.”

We discussed the difficulty of bringing the complexity of the past into the present.

“I’ve come to think that…people have very core identities,” she said. “I think…that when materially or even emotionally their identity is being challenged in such a way that it affects their own sense of well-being, I think people can focus on a particular issue and vote against their own best interests.”

•  •  •

The most interesting thing to me about Elliott Gorn’s biography Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America is that it seems to provide evidence that the working class’s flip from blue to red may be no flip at all. As I read, I wrote the word “conservative” several times in the margins where the unions, activists, or workers sounded like today’s conservatives.

Jones herself railed against Chinese immigration in the 1870s, for example, and “imbibed…and invoked…republican themes [such as “(t)he dignity of honest toil…pride in helping the nation progress, (the) sense that work conferred rights, the importance of honorable family life”] throughout her life…and enlisted republicanism in the cause of radical social transformation.” Unionist “discrimination against the Chinese in the West made racism a durable tradition,” Gorn adds later.

Gorn points out that “perhaps the greatest influence on Mary Jones as she transformed herself into Mother Jones was Julius Wayland,” a printer, publisher, and real-estate speculator, whose “politics were pro-business, conservative, Republican.” His newspaper writing was “designed for people who felt betrayed by…large corporations, but had neither the time nor the patience for Karl Marx. […] Its emotional power came from a sense of loss for the small-town individualism, the Protestant morality, and the free-labor economics that corporate rapaciousness destroyed.”

(Today’s conservative movement has substituted “government” as the destroyer of those same values. But Jones contained that urge too: “You are the power that the invisible government is after,” she told a UMW District meeting in 1914, sounding as contemporary as Donald Trump. She told attendees not to “commit any depredations” but added, “Go home boys. [W]hen I want you I’ll call you.”)

Above all, Gorn says, “Individuals like [Eugene] Debs, Wayland, and Mary Jones invented a new American radicalism, as comfortable in Kansas…as in New York…. Homegrown American radicals were not steeped in the writing of Marx and his commentators; their ideas were shaped by popular authors…who sought economic transformation while preserving, paradoxically, American freedom, democracy, and individualism. Mary Jones felt right at home in this heartland radicalism.”

Union halls in my youth often served as schoolhouses that taught why to vote Democrat, “but don’t forget that John L. Lewis was a Republican,” a docent at the Illinois Coal Museum in Gillespie told me. The idea of this free-floating radicalism goes a long way to explaining how descendants of those who went for the UMWA in the split with the PMA could turn red.

Mother Jones and Donald Trump were/are populists. Maybe a different kind of populism, working the same vein of heartland radicalism, could offer hope for narrowing the split.

•  •  •

Out at the Miners Cemetery, I met Scott Thomas, President of UMWA Local 1613, who is also on the cemetery board and the board of the Illinois Coal Museum in Gillespie. Scott offered to give me “the 50 cent tour, that’s about 30 minutes; the dollar tour, that’ll be about an hour; or you can get the two-dollar tour, and you’ll be cussing me as you go out the door.”

“You got the real deal,” he said. “None of the rest of ‘em’s the real deal here. Other than Vern. He’s the real deal. He’s a coal miner from the local I represent.”

Scott Thomas, President of UMWA Local 1613, with a life-sized cutout of Mother Jones. (Photo by John Griswold)

A row of lawn chairs had been set up for the speeches. A giant of a man in a red baseball cap sat in one, and when Loretta Williams passed he said, “Do you like my hat, Mother?” She exclaimed over it, and they talked. I could not see what the front of his hat said but could guess.

I spoke with Loretta Williams too. She laughed when she said there was no competition for portraying Mother Jones. She had been doing theatrical, researched, historical re-enactments in Alton and was chosen to be Mother Jones in 2017 because she was older and had blue eyes.

Then she was up and standing in front of Mother Jones’s grave and the monument built by the PMA to lecture the two dozen people in the cemetery.

“I bring greetings from the workers of the world, both past and present,” she said. She explained the history of “the original Labor Day,” May 1, which she stressed “is not a government holiday. Get that straight…it’s a worker’s holiday! We fought and died for fair wages, equality, and justice!” She worked out on politicians, again—this time they were like cicadas—as well as the topics of a living wage, inflation, health insurance, and pensions, with solutions predicated on unionism.

Elliott Gorn writes, “Perhaps it is best to think of Mother Jones as a character performed by Mary Jones.” Williams was good enough that it was a little uncomfortable to have Mother challenging our values and demanding a pledge to a solidarity that no longer had the same context as her original. Later I emailed her to ask how she prepared.

“Very little of my speeches are direct quotes,” she replied. “I try to start and end the speech with a quote. I do not memorize a script. Everything is tailored to my audience. […] I read over her speeches and select passages that can be loosely woven into my presentation.

“Mother used many examples but they do not resonate with workers of today. l may be 194 years old but the issues are the same. The names and patterns are repeating. There is nothing new. I do try to offer lessons using her rhetoric. Mother’s mission was to educate, agitate, and organize. Business owners have always placed their own interests above the laborers. I use Mother’s method of delivery and insert words from today’s headlines.  Mother often advocated armed resistance but I do not want to be known as one to incite violence.

“Politically I probably identify as progressive. I think that helps to compare 1924 and 2024. Theoretically, a conservative voter could ‘play’ Mother Jones but never portray her spirit and passion for the laborers of the world.

“Yes, I have encountered audience members who want to argue. I cannot rationalize with irrational people. So, I stare them down and give them the disapproving glare of a teacher. They move away mumbling to themselves.”

A folk singer with a guitar led us in “Solidarity Forever.” I tried to imagine a family who had been looking for something to do of a weekend and signed up for the history bus-tour. Maybe they bought a balloon monkey from Professor Longhair downtown and pulled-pork sandwiches from General Bradley. But suddenly Dad, who runs a “right to work” shop and would vote in a hot minute for Nikki Haley, is standing with his kids at a commemoration for a radical socialist and being asked to sing along to the labor anthem with its chorus of, “For the union makes us strong.”

It can get very confusing out in a cemetery.

Gordon Hayman, Business Representative for IATSE Local 493 of the Studio Mechanics of Missouri, a union for technicians in theater, TV, film, and trade shows, laid a wreath and made a speech. The giant of a man in the red cap finally turned around. His hat read, “Trump 20-24 Years in Prison.”

•  •  •

Downtown Gillespie, Illinois, home to the Illinois Coal Museum. (Photo by John Griswold)

Whenever I spoke with someone in Macoupin County about the legacy of Mother Jones, or unionism, or the political divide, there was a whole lot of careful peacemaking in their replies, which I remember from growing up in the same coalfield. You do not see that concern online for civility and maintaining community.

Back in town, I met Julie Caveny, a fifth-grade teacher at Mt. Olive Elementary and President of the Friends of Mother Jones Museum, who was selling souvenirs to benefit the museum. Her dad was an art teacher at the same school, so she “grew up with the history of Mother Jones and her importance to the community.”

“The town is really small,” she said but acknowledged its labor history is large and present, and “everybody who is here is familiar with it.”

I asked how people view Jones, and she said, “Well, I think there is always that diversity in politics, and that exists no matter where you’re at.” She paused. “I’m not saying [negativity] doesn’t exist and there’s not those feelings, but at the same time there is a very strong union representation in this area, a lot of laborers, a lot of people who’ve worked within labor organizations. [T]he voice might be there, you know, the opposition…but at the same time I think we see…more support than the negativity.”

•  •  •

Three days later, in Gillespie, Scott Thomas, President of Local 1613, gave me the dollar tour of the excellent Illinois Coal Museum. It is packed with artifacts of technologies, disasters, politics, and life in the coal fields and towns, where “they made everything they needed” at bakeries, dairies, breweries, farms, etc., most of which are gone now. The town leases the museum building to them for one dollar and pays their utilities. Thomas’ union gives money to it, and Helaine Silverman got them money for a couple of projects, but otherwise it is run on donations and volunteer labor.

Thomas worked 22 and a half years in two local mines, Monterey Numbers 1 and 2, and retired in 2020. His union local is all retired members. All the locals are, he said. He said there are maybe 100 mining jobs left in the area. The closest mine, Hillsboro, is nonunion.

He said the attitude toward unionism in Macoupin County is “still pretty good. Not quite as strong as it was back in the day.” He said they “hand-billed” miners two months ago at Hillsboro, “where in the old days they would not have been allowed to run a nonunion mine,” and he was surprised at how many people stopped to take their literature. A young guy told them “it was dangerous as hell” in the mine.

“[Macoupin] used to be the bluest county [in the state] outside of Chicago,” Thomas said. “And in my lifetime, and especially in the last 20 years, it’s done just an about-face. Totally flipped.”

I asked how that happened, and he said he was not sure. I asked if it was because the mines closed.

“No,” he said hesitantly. “I think for some reason—whatever reason it is—a lot of people, union people, have felt abandoned by the Democrats. […] If you would have told me 20 years ago that this county would vote Republican, I’d have called you a liar.”

“Most of ’em embrace [the union legacy]; a lot of ’em don’t know…. It’s like we skipped a generation,” he said. “Their dads didn’t work in the mine…. Most of the people that lived it are dying. […] We lose about one a month, sometimes more [in our local]. [Nationally] we’ve lost—I’m going to say 40,000 people in a decade. So that’s where it is. And that’s why I’m here.”

Scott Thomas, retired coal miner and president of the local union, sells festival-goers labor memorabilia. (Photo by John Griswold)

A block away is the former site of the Colonial Theatre, where the Progressive Miners of America, Local 1, voted themselves into existence in September 1932. The site is a small but lovely park now with a community garden, and I spoke at length with two volunteers who tend it. Back in the day, they said, people knew that if they wanted gardens, or a playground, no one was going to help them so they came together to work on them. They felt young people were not as interested in that now, or at least were not as familiar with the impulse. (I was told by residents that Gillespie Mayor John Hicks and older members of the town council resisted both labor commemoration and efforts to revitalize the town.) But there was interest from others, the volunteer gardeners said, including two restaurateurs in town, a pharmacist, and others in a local movement to “get things going.”

Elliott Gorn says the best of Mother Jones included how she “rejected America’s worship of individualism and embraced instead the community of labor.” “Above all, Mother Jones’s speeches gave working people faith in themselves. Neither bosses, ministers, nor politicians would change things—‘we, the people, have got to do it.’”

Mayor Hicks told me by email, “Coal history will always be a part of this community’s history. You either have a direct connection to the coal industry or it’s in your family history. Tourism will not generate the economy of our town, but we have a good area for families to locate. […] As far as the area being red or blue in recent years, there have been more people voting red. It used to be hard line blue, but…time changes things.”

•  •  •

“That garden is particularly wonderful,” Joann Condellone told me later, over coffee, of the former Theatre plot. “Agnes Burns Wieck,” an activist and writer nearly as famous as Mother Jones, “and her righthand woman, Katie Bianco DeRorre, called ‘the good Samaritan of the coal fields,’ brought Black and White families together through the Illinois Women’s Auxiliary of the PMA and started feeding people. So a garden is appropriate, feeding people out of that tradition and history. […] That’s about as concrete as you can get.”

PMA “radicalism,” she said, “is pretty mild stuff”—merely democratic socialism anywhere else in the world.

Condellone said that in places like Gillespie, “Like all small communities, there’s this core of really activist people, and they tend to all have activist roots. They tend to be from coal mining and [similar] families.

“[T]hese are the people…on the cemetery board, they’re on the museum board, they’re on the Turner Hall board, they work in the care center, they’re on the library board—so there are all those people we try to collaborate with [at the museum and the Mythic Mississippi Project].”

Her grandfathers were both coal miners. Her Piemontese grandfather was a carpenter, cooper, and gunsmith who wanted to own his own business and went the PMA route. Her Tuscan grandfather had “a more stable situation” and went UMWA. Three of her grandparents and her mother were born in Italy, so there were two languages at the table, and politics “was the discussion always.”

Joann Condellone, founding member of the Mother Jones Museum in Mt. Olive and of the Perpetual Care Association of the cemetery (Photo by John Griswold)

“People were very clear about what they were about,” she said. “It always makes me sad when I read something that says, ‘Oh, they really didn’t know what battles they were fighting.’ [T]hey knew exactly what they were doing. And they could verbalize it very articulately.

“Macoupin County—there’s so much energy there, it’s really interesting. It’s a tiny county, 44,000 people, but there are still so many people in Gillespie, Staunton, Mt. Olive, Virden that have—a minority in all those places—real attachment to the story and see it as a direct line to everything happening now. From what’s going to be in your museum, to who’s going to be on your school board, to local office…. So it’s small, and the overall numbers are probably tiny…but there’s still a lot of energy around the same ideas: solidarity, activism, justice for working people, the whole story, the whole Mother Jones story.

“I mean justice for working people: Yes, that story. Yeah, that’s the story.”

Joann is 82 and sounds 40. She lived in New York City in the sixties and worked in a left-wing printing shop and at a “war on poverty” project called The Real Great Society on the Lower East Side.

“And it was a different universe in those days,” she said. “People of all descriptions were smack up against each other and trying to do something together.” She has lived and worked around the country as a midwife. She said she told her neighbor recently, “’In our daily lives we’re sharing plants, we’re having wine in the garden, I have two ancient rescue dogs…I have my whole village of people in Mt. Olive. People are kind to me. And yet: Right across the woods I can see the fascist fires burning in the distance.’ You know?” She laughed.

“Metaphorically?” I asked.

She laughed again. “Yes, metaphorically. It’s like my life is an island, because there’s so much decency and so much intelligence and energy and kindness, you know? And then I listen to Chris Hedges, or I read Jeff Sharlet.” She sighed. “And there it is.”

“As the man said, ‘We fight fascists because they’re fascists, not because we’re gonna win.’”