Politics & Power Quote by Mary Harris Jones

It sounds procedural, almost civics-textbook bland, until you remember who’s talking: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, the labor agitator who treated the country like a strike line and the powerful like an obstacle. "A series of meetings all over the country" isn’t a polite listening tour. It’s an organizing blueprint. She’s mapping an alternative media system built out of halls, street corners, and union rooms, where the circulation network is bodies showing up and repeating what they heard.

The phrase "get the facts" is doing double duty. On the surface, it signals seriousness, an appeal to evidence over rumor. Underneath, it’s a direct accusation that the existing fact-factories - company papers, friendly politicians, the courts that treated workers as disposable - are manufacturing ignorance. Jones is staking a claim to epistemic authority: the facts will come from workers’ testimony, from the lived data of wages, injuries, evictions, and blacklists.

"Before the American people" is the sharpest lever. She’s not lobbying a committee; she’s prosecuting a case in the court of public legitimacy. The subtext is that industrial conflict isn’t a private dispute between employer and employee. It’s a national moral question, and the nation has been kept from seeing the evidence. In an era before broadcast saturation, this is how you bypass gatekeepers: create the audience, then educate it - not as consumers of news, but as participants in a political waking-up.