The Most Dangerous Woman in America?
Mother Jones travelled throughout the United States agitating against companies that hired children and women to work in hazardous conditions. In 1903 she organized children working in mills and mines in the "Children's Crusade." In a march from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York, Jones and her supporters ended up at the home of President Theodore Roosevelt with banners demanding "We want to go to School and not the mines!" Though Roosevelt refused to meet with them, the marchers brought the issue of child labor into public awareness.
Mother Jones magazine became a focus of the U.S. presidential campaign this week, when they released a secret videotape of GOP candidate Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser. As educators, we tell students to look for context clues in defining vocabulary. So, again and again, I was surprised by how many people discussing this story seemed unable to connect the journal's name to any political labels because they didn't know who Mother Jones was.
Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me (Chapter 6: The Invisibility of Antiracism in American History Textbooks) shares that, "Most textbooks deprive us of our racial idealists." I would correct that to "Most textbooks deprive us of our radical idealists." Obviously, the term "radical" is a subjective term to both the author and the reader of textbooks. Loewen has always too narrowly defined equalitarianism by race when he explains, "Our history textbooks...deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past."
As the Chairperson of the first Human Rights Committee in my community, I found many politicians wished to define human rights by Loewen's philosophy, leaving too many citizens in need under served by representation and resources.
Not now, nor in the past was discrimination purely based on race. Issues of scarcity and austerity have far more influenced ideologies and discriminatory practices - whether we are discussing John Brown and Abraham Lincoln or today. New York Times columnist and journalism professor, Thomas Edsall makes these arguments in his book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics:
America doesn’t only need to reconcile conflicting concrete interests; the nation faces a clash between highly moralized worldviews. And with every passing year of short-term economic pain, we grow less calm and rational as the bleak short-term outlook induces panic and confusion about the long-term. (Slate review)
"A lot of this has become more intense since the culture wars and the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. There's been a real divide. And there is a different worldview held by liberals and Democrats from that held by conservatives and Republicans. They're not totally antithetical. They share many -- they're both human beings, but they put priorities on very different things."(PBS interview)
One day we’ll look back and find such polarizing language strange, given the broad consensus in favor of a mixed economy with some regulation and a social safety net. It is scarcity, Edsall contends, that turns modest policy differences into zero-sum showdowns between his “haves” and aspiring “have-nots.” (New York Times review)
Idealism is neither radical, nor is it based on race - for those of us committed to public service, the cause is humanity.
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