Michael Mooney

Michael Mooney was a Leadville miner, turned organizer, who had been born in Dublin around 1852 and immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. In Leadville, he was an organizer for the Knights of Labor as well as a leader in the Wolfe Tone Guard, Leadville’s Irish militia with ties to Clan na Gael, an Irish Republican organization. In 1880, miners went on strike against the Chrysolite mine, demanding a raise from $3/day to $4/day, and Mooney was selected as their leader.

Mooney was a charismatic speaker with a keen eye for public relations. Knowing anti-Irish stereotypes would be leveraged against them, he forbade the miners from drinking or fighting while on strike. The strike was guided by values of respectability, nonviolence, Irish nationalism, and ethnic pride, rooted in Mooney’s beliefs in the value of all workers and their rights to share in the fruits of their labor.

After the strike, Mooney married Sarah Gilgallon, daughter of an Irish miner who had moved to Leadville around 1880 from the Anthracite region of Pennsylvania. They had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood.
Mooney was made to pay for his activism. He was blacklisted by the mine owners, and never worked again in a Leadville mine. But he persevered, ultimately becoming a well-known labor leader, delivering speeches across the American West. After the strike, he worked as a saloonkeeper for a while, then ran for Leadville’s city council in 1883 on the Greenback-Labor ticket. In 1887, the Mooney family finally abandoned Leadville. They moved to Seattle, then Butte, Montana in the 1890’s. There, Mooney rose to a leadership role in the Butte Miners Union, a branch of the Western Federation of Miners.

Mooney ultimately settled in Los Angeles, where he lived from the early 1900s until his death in 1923 at the age of 71.