The stories of labor organizer Mother Jones, photographer Matthew Brady and entertainer Bing Crosby.
VOICE ONE:
Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Shirley Griffith. March 17th is Saint Patrick's Day, a time to celebrate Irish culture. The Census Bureau says that in 2007, 36.5 million people in the United States claimed Irish ancestry. That was more than 10 percent of all Americans -- and more than 8 times the number of people in Ireland itself.
VOICE ONE:
This week on our program, we remember three Irish-Americans: the labor activist Mother Jones, the early photographer Matthew Brady and the entertainer Bing Crosby.
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VOICE TWO:
That song is called "The Death of Mother Jones." Gene Autry recorded it 3 months after she died in 1930.
Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones Mary Harris Jones was one of America's most effective labor organizers. Yet few people knew her real name. She rarely, if ever, used it. She was known as Mother Jones. Those on the other side of the labor struggle called her "The Most Dangerous Woman in America."
That is also the name of a book from two thousand one by Elliott Gorn, a professor now at Brown University in Rhode Island. His research produced new information about Mother Jones.
For example, she said she was born in Ireland in 1830. She was born in Ireland but Professor Gorn found that the year was 1837. In other words, she was 7 years younger than she claimed.
VOICE ONE:
Mary Harris was a schoolteacher in the state of Tennessee when she married an iron worker named George Jones. They had four children.
But in 1867 her husband and all four children died of yellow fever.
Mary Jones moved to Chicago and became a successful dressmaker. Then everything she had was destroyed again -- this time, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
After that she became involved in the labor movement. Mary Jones seemed to appear whenever and wherever there were labor problems.
She often worked with coal miners. They began calling her "mother," and she started using the name Mother Jones. Sometimes she was called "the Miner's Angel."
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Coal was produced mostly in 6 states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia and Colorado.
In eighteen forty, the United States had 7,000 coal miners. They dug about 2 million tons of coal from the ground.
By 1900, the number of miners had reached almost 700,000. And that year they produced 350 million tons of coal.
Accidents killed thousands of mine workers. Miners were low paid and generally lived in towns owned and operated by the mine owner. Under this system, the company paid the miners, then the miners paid the money back to the company in return for goods and rent.
VOICE ONE:
Mine workers who attempted to organize met fierce opposition, and sometimes violence. Mother Jones believed that unions represented the best hope for coal miners and other workers to improve their lives.
She spoke out against child labor and unsafe working conditions. "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living," she would say.
She worked for an early union called the Knights of Labor. Later she became an organizer for the United Mine Workers union. She was also a founder of the union known as the Industrial Workers of the World.
And for several years she traveled as a speaker for the Socialist Party. But, in the end, she found that she liked the ideas of Socialism more than the party and its supporters.
Mother Jones led protests to further the cause of unions. Many of the protests involved women and children. She led a march of miners' wives in western Pennsylvania in 1900. And three years later she led a children's march to President Theodore Roosevelt's New York home to protest child labor.
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Mother Jones was arrested many times. In West Virginia in nineteen twelve, violence connected to a miners' strike led to her trial and conviction for conspiracy to murder.
The state governor freed her, but only after the United States Senate ordered an investigation into conditions in the West Virginia coal fields.
In 1913, she was kept under house arrest for nine weeks after helping to organize mine workers in Colorado.
Mother Jones died after celebrating, supposedly, her 100th birthday in 1930. Professor Gorn says she was really 93. But her place in labor history is undisputed. Mother Jones is recognized in the National Women's Hall of Fame and the United States Labor Department's Labor Hall of Fame.
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VOICE ONE:
Matthew Brady Now, we move on to an American whose father was born in Ireland. Matthew Brady documented the American Civil War in pictures. He has been called the father of photojournalism.
He was born near Lake George in New York State around 1822. His father was a farmer.
Matthew Brady moved to New York City where he learned about photography, still a new technology then.
He began taking pictures of famous people in 1844. Among his subjects were Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe.
He wanted to photograph more political leaders, so in 1849 he moved to Washington, D.C.
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The Civil War began in 1861. Matthew Brady decided to document the conflict. Yet he suffered from poor eyesight. So he put together teams of photographers to help him.
Brady took some of the battlefield pictures himself. But he got credit for all the photographs because they were made by his teams.
People could now see battlefield deaths as captured by a camera rather than an artist's pen or paintbrush. But Brady could not sell enough pictures to pay the costs of taking and processing them. He had to sell his offices to pay his debts.
In 1875, Congress bought all of his Civil War pictures for 25,000 dollars. But even that was not enough to save him from financial ruin.
Matthew Brady died a poor man in 1896. But the pictures that he and his photographers made left a wealth of history for all future generations to see.
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VOICE ONE:
Bing Crosby was a singer and actor whose mother's family came from Ireland. He was born Harry Lillis Crosby in 1900 and three in the northwestern city of Tacoma, Washington.
There are different stories about how he got his nickname. One version says his friends started calling him Bingo, and later Bing, after characters in a local comic strip, the Bingville Bugle. Another story goes that when he was a boy playing cowboys and Indians, he shouted "bing" instead of "bang" after a make-believe gunshot.
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Bing Crosby Bing Crosby started to sing professionally in the nineteen twenties. His group the Rhythm Boys joined the famous Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. When the group broke up, Bing started singing alone in nightclubs and on the radio. And he started appearing in movies.
He made more than 60 films. He won an Academy Award for best actor for the 1944 movie "Going My Way." He played an Irish priest, Father O'Malley. Later, he had his own radio and television shows.
As a singer, Bing Crosby's biggest recording success came from a 1942 movie. In "Holiday Inn" he sang a new song by Irving Berlin. That recording of "White Christmas" has sold more than 100 million copies. That puts it among the best-selling singles of all time. Bing Crosby died in 1977.
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VOICE ONE:
Our program was written by Nancy Steinbach and produced by Caty Weaver. I'm Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Shirley Griffith. You can find our programs with transcripts and MP3s at voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.
