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William D. Haywood and the Radical Labor Movement
William D. Haywood is widely considered one of the foremost and most feared of America's labor leaders. Tall and gruff, "Big" Bill was a fiery speaker, powerful organizer and uninhibited critic of government and big business.
Haywood was born in Salt Lake City in 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was linked in Utah at Promontory Summit. Brigham Young was still serving as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when Haywood was born in Bingham Canyon, the son of a former Pony Express rider. At the age of nine Haywood punctured his right eye in a whittling accident. For the rest of his life, Haywood would offer his left profile to photographers in an effort to hide his blind eye.
Before his tenth birthday Haywood had left school and entered the mines to help support his family.
While working in a silver mine in northern Idaho in 1896, Haywood was exposed to the unionizing efforts of the Western Federation of Miners. After a meeting with WFM organizer Ed Boyce, Haywood threw himself into union membership and activities. Within a few years he was serving as Secretary-Treasurer of the WFM, and traveling throughout the West as a union organizer. Because of increasing conflicts between miners and mine owners, Haywood often traveled secretly through embattled mining camps to avoid arrest.
At the turn of the twentieth century Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners campaigned for eight hour working days for underground miners. Most mining camps required underground workers to log ten hours on the job each day, not counting transportation time up and down the mine shafts, and to work thirteen out of fourteen days. Because of the WFM efforts, Utah became the first state in the nation to enact an eight hour work day for miners.
By 1902 Haywood joined with Charles Moyer to form the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners. It was an uneasy partnership from the outset. Moyer was cautious by nature, and generally believed in negotiation rather than conflict. Haywood urged strikes and confrontation as the most practical path to forcing company officials to treat workers fairly. The emergence of Moyer and Haywood coincided with violent clashes in the mine fields of the West. Dozens died in showdowns between striking miners and company owners in Colorado, culminating the bombing of a train carrying non-union miners near Independence in 1904. Thirteen people died in the attack, and company officials were quick to tie the bombing to the fiery rhetoric of Big Bill Haywood. No charges were ever filed.
Haywood skyrocketed to national notoriety in 1906. The publicity would cement his infamy in the eyes of some, his celebrity in the eyes of others.
Shortly after Christmas in 1905, former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg was returning to his home in Caldwell after a day in his nearby office. As he opened his garden gate a bomb exploded, shattering the forty-four year old Steunenberg's body. He died within hours.
Local police quickly arrested a suspicious figure staying in a Caldwell hotel. He eventually was identified as Harry Orchard. Under grueling questioning by law enforcement and Pinkerton private detectives, Orchard confessed to being an assassin hired by the Western Federation of Miners. He identified dozens of victims, including the non-union miners killed in the Independence, Colorado train bombing of 1904. Orchard claimed the murder of Frank Steunenberg had been ordered by WFM President Charles Moyer, former board member George Pettibone, and union Secretary-Treasurer Bill Haywood.
Pinkerton detectives executed a secret raid and arrested Moyer, Pettibone and Haywood in Denver, Colorado. Foregoing any attempts at formally extraditing the men, the Pinkertons in effect kidnaped the suspects and hurried them on to a private train that raced through the night, delivering them to Boise for trial. On their arrival, the chief Pinkerton detective announced the men "would never leave Idaho alive."
Haywood appealed his arrest, claiming it was nothing short of kidnaping. As the case wound its way through the court system, he busied himself in the Idaho Penitentiary by taking a correspondence course in criminal law and running for Governor of Colorado on the Socialist ticket. When a decision was finally handed down, the United States Supreme Court decried the abduction of the suspects but ruled that the arrests should stand. In Idaho, prosecutors decided to try the defendants individually, with Big Bill Haywood as the first test case. Haywood went to trial in Boise in the summer of 1907 on a charge of conspiring to murder Frank Steunenberg. Prosecutors said their only goal was the death penalty.
From the outset the court drama was billed "the trial of the century." Dozens of reporters packed the tiny courtroom on a daily basis. Much of the attraction was focused on the attorneys in the case. Wiiliam Borah, recently confirmed to sit as a United States Senator from Idaho and a close personal friend of Frank Steunenberg, led the prosecution team. Clarence Darrow, perhaps the nation's best known defense attorney, agreed to defend Haywood. Darrow's fee was paid by hundreds of small donations from union members around the nation.
Despite weeks of testimony, the trial turned on the confession of Harry Orchard. On the stand Orchard recounted in detail his arrangement with the Western Federation of Miners, and repeatedly identified Haywood as the force behind the violence. Under cross-examination, Darrow emphasized Orchard's criminal history, the absence of any evidence to back-up his story, and Orchard's negotiations with Pinkerton detectives to spare Orchard from execution.
Darrow's defense turned on depicting Haywood as the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy concocted by mine owners who wanted to silence Haywood's radical voice in support of miners. On the stand, Haywood firmly denied Orchard's story, asserted his innocence, and recounted stories of how his union activities had been targeted by mine owners and the government.
After painfully long closing arguments that stretched the endurance of jurors, judge and audience alike in the blazing summer heat, the case went to the jury on the afternoon of July 28, 1907. By midnight there were rumors that the jury had voted 11-to-1 to convict Haywood, and that the last holdout would soon change sides. The Idaho Statesman prepared a headline announcing Haywood's conviction.
The next morning the jury filed back into the courtroom. The foreman passed the verdict to court clerk Otto Peterson, who read the note aloud. "We, the jury in the above entitled case, find the defendant William D. Haywood. . .not guilty."
Despite complaints that the trial had been rigged, either through bribes or death threats from the Western Federation of Miners, Bill Haywood walked out of the Boise courtroom a free man.
But the long months of the trial had taken a toll on the leadership of the WFM. Haywood and Moyer argued repeatedly during their months in the Idaho penitentiary. Haywood was becoming more militant in his approach to labor conflicts, and Moyer was convinced that compromise and negotiation were the most effective tools for workers to use in dealing with the system. Haywood's demands for actions clashed head-on with Moyer's demands for patience, and in 1908 Haywood left the Western Federation of Miners.
Looking for a new, aggressive organization Haywood threw his energies behind the Industrial Workers of the World. Vowing in its preamble that the working class had nothing in common with capitalists, the IWW represented the most radical labor organization of its day. The group sought to organize the most recent immigrants and the most unskilled workers into the IWW to give them a voice in the workplace. Nicknamed "wobblies," the group also advocated sabotage or "direct action" against employers who refused to recognize the IWW unionizing efforts. By 1915 Big Bill Haywood was head of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Haywood was at the center of a string of dramatic labor conflicts that shook the nation in the years leading to America's entry into World War One. He was an atheist, and his blunt and caustic public comments on Christianity and the Bible made him a target of clerics throughout the nation. His speeches in support of IWW songwriter Joe Hill claimed vast conspiracies of government and industry to destroy the rights of workers, but did nothing to stop the execution of Hill for murder in Utah in 1915. Haywood encouraged numerous strikes throughout the nation, and forged an image of the IWW as a group that would use any means at its disposal to change a system it despised. At its peak, the group had more than three million members.
Haywood was an outspoken critic of America's entry into World War One, claiming it was an invention of capitalists to make business rich, and that young men on all sides would be sacrificed to powerful elites. He urged workers to resist joining the army and to slow down their work in defense industries. In 1918 Haywood was convicted of violating federal espionage and sedition laws when he called for a strike during wartime. He briefly went to a federal prison, but was released on bail as his case was appealed. He seized the opportunity to flee the country, and made his way to join the bolshevik revolution in Russia.
While journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook The World) is often recognized as an American playing a role in the revolution that resulted in the Soviet Union, Big Bill Haywood arguably had a more significant presence among the leaders of the new government. Cited as a "trusted advisor," Haywood was often used by the bolshevik government as a spokesperson for the advancements in worker opportunity claimed by Marxist theorists like Vladimir Lenin.
Plagued by ill health, Haywood quickly faded from prominence in Moscow. Several historians have claimed that Haywood ultimately rejected the "worker's paradise" of the Soviet Union, viewing it as an abusive police state that provided few true benefits for the peasants. He died in 1928. Half of his ashes were ceremoniously buried in a wall of honor at the Kremlin, next to the remains of John Reed. The remainder were quietly returned to the United States and buried in Chicago, near a monument to American workers.
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