Energetic and peripatetic well into her 80's, Mother Jones devoted much of the last three decades of her life to traveling from one troubled labor site to another. Gorn, a professor of history at Purdue, reveals that there was ample reason for these hyperbolic reactions. Gorn's lively, well-honed biography, "Mother Jones." On the floor of the House of Representatives she was branded a "notorious and troublesome woman." A United States attorney is reported to have named her "the most dangerous woman in America," the epithet that provides the subtitle for Elliott J. The establishment types she battled had less flattering things to say about her. One newspaper pronounced her "God's great ministering angel," another "perhaps the most remarkable woman in America." "That's Jesus Christ come down on earth again, and playing he's an old woman," a miner declared. For the coal miners and steelworkers she defended, she was little less than a saint. She elicited both veneration and vitriol. Imprisoned several times as a subversive, she courted arrest, once boasting, "I can raise more hell in jail than out." In her bold efforts to rally workers, she harangued crowds, led union marches and stared down gun-toting company thugs. THE labor agitator Mother Jones (1837-1930) relished her role as a hell-raiser.
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