From the Archives: The Mother Jones Monument
It's Labor Day here in the United States. One of the things I do to celebrate is to share a post from the past about major players in the early American labor movement. I think it's important to remember that the labor movement fought hard for many things we shouldn't take for granted, like a safe workplace, child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, and paid time off.
This year, I want to return to a post from 2022: the story of Mary Harris Jones, known in her time as Mother Jones
Driving from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks and back over the last mumble years,(1) I have passed the sign for the Mother Jones monument many, many times. It is a plain, almost amateurish, sign, without the official imprimatur(2) of a brown tourist attraction sign(3) or the flash of billboard advertising a show in Branson. Nothing about it is designed to lure a curious history bugg off the highway. And up to now, we have not been lured.
That changed this year, thanks to an information panel in an Illinois highway rest stop.(4) My Own True Love and I were hooked.
I had been vaguely aware that Mother Jones was a union organizer, but I had no idea how important she was at her time.
Mother Jones was in some ways the Grandma Moses of union organizers: in fact, when she was testifying before a committee in the Senate on labor issues, a senator mocked her as the “grandmother of all agitators.” (She replied that she would someday like to be called the “great-grandmother of all agitators.”) At the point that she began her career as a union organizers, Mary Harris Jones was a poor, widowed, Irish immigrant. She had survived the potato famine, the loss of her husband and four children in a yellow fever epidemic, and the Chicago fire,bwhich destroyed her successful dressmaking shop.
After each loss, she reinvented herself. In the 1890s, she reinvented herself one more time, as “Mother Jones.” The name was subversive: playing against and with nineteenth century domestic stereotypes of women. Mary Jones cast herself as the mother of oppressed people everywhere. At a time when women were “supposed” to be quiet and stay home,(5) Mother Jones was a street orator with no fixed address, who traveled the United States for twenty-five years, moving from cause to cause. She had no interest in being “ladylike.” As she told a group of women in New York: “Never mind if you are not lady-like, you are woman-like. God Almighty made the woman and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
Jones rose to prominence as an organizer for the United Mine workers, who paid her a stipend, but she went wherever she felt she was needed. She worked with striking garment workers in Chicago, bottle washers in Milwaukee breweries, Pittsburgh steelworkers, and El Paso streetcar operators, helping them fight against 12-hour days, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the financial servitude of company housing and the company store.
Her motto was “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living”—the world would be a better place if we all adopted it as our own.
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When we got to the monument in Mt. Olive, Illinois, we learned there is a second part to the story. Illinois became a battleground for labor rights in 1898, when the Chicago Virden Coal Company challenged the miners’ contract. They brought in a train loaded with strikebreakers, and armed guards to back them. Miners from across the state joined together to stand their ground against the company. In the violent encounter that became known as the Battle of Virden or the Virden Massacre, thirteen people were killed, including six guards and seven miners. Thirty miners were wounded. Mother Jones considered the battle the birthplace of rank-and-file unionism.
A Mt. Olive church refused to allow the miners to be buried in their churchyard, fearing their graves would become a pilgrimage site for the labor movement. (This is what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.) In response, the United Mine Workers built the their own cemetery in Mt. Olive, which in fact became a pilgrimage site after Mother Jones, at her request, was buried there in 1930. (Personally, the union buttons that had been left at the foot of the monument choked me up.)
(1) And by years, I mean decades
(2)Is there such a thing as an unofficial imprimatur?
(3) I went down a small rabbit hole trying to discover who approves such signs. I didn’t get an answer, but I did learn that the signs originated in France.
(4) We’re seeing more and more historical markers at highway rest stops, and I for one would like to say “bravo!” Not only because I love a historical marker, but because it encourages the curious to spend more time at the rest stop. After all, the point of the stop is not just to use the restroom, but to stretch the legs, rest the eyes, and fluff the brain, thereby making the next stretch of driving a little safer.
(5) Or so the popular account of history tells us. If I have learned anything in writing this blog, it is that the ideal of the “angel of the household” applied only to members of the relatively prosperous middle-class and that even within that class many women didn’t fit that mold for many reasons. Just yesterday a friend sent me the story of the team of “gentlewomen who had experienced reverses” who created the restaurants in Marshall Field’s in downtown Chicago. A very different story than that of Mother Jones, but one that also stands outside what we are taught was the nineteenth century norm.
Road Trip Through History: The Resistance Museum in Oslo
The Resistance Museum in Oslo was not included in our history tour of Norway.* That turned out to be a good thing in my opinion. My Own True Love and I spent the entire morning at the museum on our own the day after the tour ended. We would have been frustrated at being hurried through it as part of a group. And the museum told its own story very clearly. In short, it's a history bugg must-see if you're in Oslo.
Here's the longer version:
The Resistance Museum is unusual in that it was created by members of the resistance. Because the museum is in some ways a historical document writ large, the exhibits have not been updated since it was opened to the public in 1970.** Even without the help of modern museum technology, it is a powerful example of visual story telling. And it was the perfect end to our trip.
Beginning with the first day of the invasion, the museum uses photographs, blown-up newspaper pages, recordings, and artifacts to tell the story of Norway’s resistance to its Nazi occupiers (We were grateful that the museum designers provided English signs alongside the Norwegian.) The museum provides a step-by-step history of the Nazi occupation, giving the larger context and lots of detail for many of the stories we had heard over the tour.
A considerable section of the museum focused on the creation, training, deployment and adventures of the Kompani Linge, which operated as saboteurs and resistance fighters in conjunction with Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive). But it did not limit the story to the obvious heroism of armed resistance. It also portrayed acts of civil disobedience against Nazi attacks on personal freedom. After all, heroes don’t always carry guns and blow things up.
Norwegian teachers in the concentration camp near Kirkenes.
If I had to choose a favorite story of the resistance from the museum, it would be the action of Norway’s school teachers, known as the Defense of Education. In 1942, Vidkun Quisling’s proto-Nazi government** created a new Norwegian Teacher’s Union. All teachers were required to join and pledge to teach Nazi principles in the classroom. Almost immediately, an underground group in Oslo sent out a statement for teachers to copy and mail to the authorities, stating that they refused to participate. Roughly 90 percent of Norway’s 14,000 teachers signed the protest statement.
Quisling responded by closing the schools for a month. Not a popular decision. More than 200,000 unhappy parents wrote letters of protest to the government. Meanwhile, many teachers defied the governments orders and held classes in private.
Hoping to break the teacher’s resistance, the government arrested some 1,000 male teachers. In April, the government of occupation sent 499 of those teachers to a concentration camp near Kirkenes, in the arctic. News of the relocation leaked and crowds gathered along the train tracks when the teachers were being transported, singing and giving the prisoners food.****
In mid-May, the Nazis gave up on creating a fascist teachers’ organization. By November, those teachers who survived had returned from the concentration camp. The Nazi curriculum was never imposed on Norway’s schools, thanks to Norway's teachers.
*For those of you haven't been reading along, in June My Own True Love and I spent two weeks in Norway on a history-nerd tour run by the Vesterheim Museum. It was fabulous.
**Which is longer ago than I like to think.
***More to come on Quisling in a later blog.
****Not a small gesture given wartime food shortages.
Little Norway and Sigrid Schultz
First, let me say that this post is not about either the now defunct Little Norway living history site in Wisconsin or Little Norway Resort in Minnesota, which are the first things that a Google search of Little Norway will pull up.
Instead it is the story of the main training camp for the Royal Norwegian Air Force during World War II. Or at least a story about the camp. There is probably a story to tell about every man who trained there.
Here goes:
After King Haakon VII and members of the Norwegian government escaped from the Nazis, they formed a government-in-exile in London. They decided to keep those Norwegian military pilots who also managed to escape as a separate, wholly Norwegian military unit.
In the best of all possible worlds, the Royal Norwegian Air Force would have established a training base in Europe.* With most of Europe under Nazi control, the best alternative was Canada. On November 10, 1940, the base known as “Little Norway” went into service outside Toronto. The camp was initially set up at the Toronto Flying Club’s airport on the Toronto Islands. Hundreds of young men escaped from Norway through Sweden or by way of the North Sea and found their way to Canada to enlist in the new service—a trip that in many cases required a heroic effort. The islands soon proved to be too small and the base was relocated to Muskoka Airport, north of Toronto. More than 3300 Norwegian air men and ground crews would train at the camp.
The first Norwegian squadron arrived in Iceland in April 1941. They patrolled the North Atlantic looking for German submarines. The second, a fighting squadron with an all-Norwegian air and ground crew, arrived in England in June, 1941, followed by a third in January 1942. Both of these squadrons fought as part of the British RAF; they participated in the Dieppe Raid, the Normandy landings, and the liberation of Holland.
In the spring of 1942, the leaders of the base invited Sigrid Schultz to visit Little Norway.** They had heard her broadcasts from Berlin about the invasion of Norway and thought she might be interested in doing a story about the camp as the second anniversary of the invasion drew near.
Sigrid spent a week in Toronto, meeting with the young pilots and working on her story. It was easy reporting by her standards: instead of rushing to meet her filing deadline with the details of a breaking story, she could take time to collect material and write the story. She met with the young Norwegians who had escaped from their country to help fight the Germans in a canteen that smelled of fresh cut wood, pine, cleanliness, and a whiff of coffee—scents that perhaps carried with them memories of summer holidays with her cousins in Norway. The young fliers were eager to tell her whatever they knew. She asked each of the men the same question: “What convinced you that you had to leave Norway and come out and fight?” Each had a story of the incident which finally made him decided to risk his life to join the armed forces in exile. Many had thrilling stories of dangerous escapes. The details of each man’s story were different, but the core was the same: the crimes of the Gestapo and the SS convinced them that life in Norway under Nazi rule was not to be tolerated
During her visit, the airmen gave her a parade, passing in review before her while she struggled to hide her tears, perhaps remembering her young Norwegian fiancé who died in the Great War.
As part of her visit, she did a fifteen- minute broadcast from Toronto for the Canadian radio network and Mutual Broadcasting on the second anniversary of the invasion of Norway. Before she spoke, she had to show the text of what she had written to Lieutenant-Colonel Ole Reistadt, the commanding officer of the camp. Speaking to the young men had reminded her about the role neutral Sweden had played in defeat of Norway by allowing Germany to send army supplies through the country. She had been angry then. Now she was angry again. She “made some very nasty remarks about the Swedes” in her script. Reistadt reminded her that neutrality had two sides: “Miss Schultz, you can’t do that because you have a lot of Swedish civilians who help our people escape from the Germans over the mountains. You cannot be nasty to them.” So, she later said with a sigh, “I had to be ladylike.”
Her article ran in the Chicago Tribune on August 16. It was a lively tribute to the young men of the Norwegian air force.
*Actually, in the best of all possible worlds, the Nazis would not have occupied Norway and the question of where to establish an aviation training base would not have arisen.
**Anyone who's been reading along here for the last several years knows who Sigrid Schultz was. But in case you stumbled on this post while looking for info about Little Norway, here's the short version: Sigrid Schultz was the Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1941. She was one of the first American reporters to warn her readers just how dangerous the Nazis were and one of the last American reporters to make it out of Berlin.
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It is worth pointing out that the Norwegian merchant marine played a much larger, if less glamorous, role in supporting the Allies in World War II than the Royal Norwegian Air Force. In 1940, Norway had the largest merchant fleet in the world, some 1100 ships. At the time of the Nazi invasion, 1024 of those ships were at sea. King Haakon ordered them to proceed to allied ports. All of them complied. They were then put in the service of the Allies. Norwegian ships carried half the fuel and one third of all other supplies transported to Britain, at great cost to themselves: almost 4,000 seaman killed, some 6,000 additional casualties and 570 ships lost.