Bill Haywood Totally Explained

Everything about Bill Haywood totally explained

William Dudley Haywood (February 4, 1869–May 18, 1928), better known as Big Bill Haywood, was a prominent figure in the American labor movement. Haywood was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence textile strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
   Haywood was an advocate of industrial unionism, a labor philosophy that favors organizing all workers in an industry under one union, regardless of the specific trade or skill level; this was in contrast to the craft unions that were prevalent at the time, such as the AFL. His belief that workers of all ethnicities should be united also clashed with many unions. His strong preference for direct action over political tactics alienated him from the Socialist Party, and contributed to his dismissal in 1913.
   Never one to shy from violent conflicts, At age nine, he injured his right eye while whittling, permanently blinding it. Haywood never had his damaged eye replaced with a glass eye; when photographed, he'd turn his head to show his left profile. Also at age nine, he began working in the mines; he never received much formal education. After brief stints as a cowboy and a homesteader, he returned to mining in 1896. the Haymarket Riot in 1886 and the Pullman Strike in 1894 fostered Haywood's interest in the labor movement. A manifesto was written and sent around the country. Unionists who agreed with the manifesto were invited to attend a convention to found the new union which was to become the Industrial Workers of the World.
   At 10 A.M. on June 27, 1905, Haywood addressed the crowd assembled at Brand's Hall in Chicago. In the audience were two hundred delegates from organizations all over the country representing socialists, anarchists, miners, industrial unionists and rebel workers. Haywood opened the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World with the following speech: was arrested for the crime, and evidence was found in his hotel room. Famed Pinkerton detective James McParland, who had infiltrated and helped to destroy the Molly Maguires, was placed in charge of the investigation.
   Before any trial had occurred, McParland ordered that Orchard be placed on death row in the Boise penitentiary, with restricted food rations and under constant surveillance. After McParland had prepared his investigation, he met with Orchard over a "sumptuous lunch" followed by cigars. The Pinkerton detective told Orchard that he could escape immediate hanging only if he implicated the leaders of the WFM. In addition to using the threat of hanging, McParland promised food, cigars, better treatment, possible freedom, and even a possible financial reward if Orchard cooperated. The detective obtained a 64-page confession from Orchard in which the suspect took responsibility for a string of crimes and at least seventeen murders.
   McParland then used perjured extradition papers, which falsely stated that WFM leaders had been at the scene of the Steunenberg murder, to cross the state line into Denver, Colorado and arrest Haywood, Moyer, and George Pettibone. McParland forced the three men onto a special train and extradited them to Idaho before the courts in Denver could intervene. The abductions were so egregious that even American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, who had little good to say about the WFM, directed his union to raise funds for the defense. Yet a habeas corpus appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, with only Justice Joseph McKenna dissenting.
   Haywood's trial began on May 9, 1907, with famed Chicago defense attorney Clarence Darrow defending him. The government had only the testimony of Orchard, the confessed bomber, to implicate Haywood and the other defendants, and Orchard's checkered past and admitted violent history were skillfully exploited by Darrow. in effect working for both sides. He admitted to accepting money from Pinkerton detectives, and had caused explosions during mining disputes before he'd met Moyer or Haywood. After Darrow's final summation (which moved many in the courtroom to tears), a striker that nineteen witnesses said was killed by police gunfire, and martial law was declared. In response, Haywood and other organizers arrived to take charge of the strike. A national outrage was sparked when authorities forcibly detained a group of women and children who were being evacuated from the town. A congressional hearing and the attention of President Howard Taft pressured the mill owners into cooperating with the strikers; on March 12, the owners agreed to all the demands of the strikers, officially ending the strike.
   However, Haywood and the IWW were not yet finished in Lawrence; despite the end of the strike, Ettor and Giovannitti remained in prison. Haywood threatened the authorities with another strike, saying "Open the jail gates or we'll close the mill gates." Legal efforts and a one-day strike on September 30 didn't prompt the authorities to drop the charges. However, on November 26, Ettor and Giovannitti were acquitted.

Socialist Party of America involvement

For many years, Haywood was an active member of the Socialist Party of America. Haywood had always been largely Marxist in his political views, and campaigned for Eugene Debs during the 1908 presidential election, traveling by train with Debs around the country. In a party opposed to violence and dedicated to respectability, Haywood openly advised socialists and workers to practice sabotage and risk imprisonment to foster revolution. This conflict eventually led to Haywood's recall from the National Executive Committee in January of 1913; thousands of IWW members left the Socialist Party with him. Despite the long holdout and fundraising efforts, the strike ended in failure on July 28, 1913.

Espionage trial

Haywood and the IWW frequently clashed with the government during their labor actions. The onset of World War I gave the federal government the opportunity to take action against Haywood and the IWW. Using the newly passed Espionage Act of 1917 as justification, the Department of Justice raided forty-eight IWW meeting halls on September 5th, 1917. Haywood had watched men die in unsafe mine tunnels, and had marched with Kelly's Army. He had suffered a serious hand injury in the mines, and found that his only support came from other miners. When Haywood listened to Ed Boyce of the WFM addressing a group of miners in 1896, he discovered radical unionism and welcomed it.
Haywood also shared Boyce's skepticism of the role played by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Haywood criticized labor officials who were, in his view, insufficiently supportive of Labor militants. For example, he recalled with disdain the opening remarks of Samuel Gompers when the AFL leader appeared before Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby on behalf of the Haymarket prisoners:

I have differed all my life with the principles and methods of the condemned.

Gompers was an advocate of craft unionism, Furthermore, in 1900 Gompers became the first vice-president of the National Civic Federation, which was "dedicated to the fostering of harmony and collaboration between capital and organized labor." But Haywood had become convinced by the experiences of striking railroad workers that a different union philosophy, some form of industrial unionism, was necessary for workers to obtain justice. This had become apparent in 1888 when the craft-organized locomotive firemen kept their engines running, helping their employers to break a strike called by the railroad engineers. Eugene V. Debs had been head of the locomotive firemen's union, but he resigned to create the American Railway Union (ARU), organized industrially to include all railroad workers. In June of 1894, the ARU voted to join in solidarity with the ongoing Pullman strike. Railroad traffic throughout the nation was "largely paralyzed. The effectiveness of the industrial form of unionism was evident from the start." The strike was eventually crushed by massive government intervention that included 2600 Deputy U.S. Marshals, and 14,000 state and federal troops in Chicago alone. Debs attempted to seek help from the American Federation of Labor. He asked that AFL railroad brotherhood affiliates present the following proposition to the Railway Managers' Association:

...that the strikers return to work at once as a body, upon the condition that they be restored to their former positions, or, in the event of failure, to call a general strike.

Observing that the ARU was defenseless, AFL officials viewed the plight of the rival organization as an opportunity to boster their own railway affiliates, and instructed all AFL affiliates to withhold help. In spite of what Haywood perceived as "treachery" and "double-cross" by the AFL leadership — the ARU members had put their own organization at risk for others, but the AFL refused to even help them try to end the strike in a draw — the power of workers crossing their trade lines and jurisdictional boundaries to join together in a fight against capital greatly impressed him. He described the revelation of such power as "a great rift of light." a criticism that was later echoed by the Industrial Workers of the World.

Haywood's revolutionary imperative

Haywood's industrial unionism was much broader than formulating a more effective method of conducting strikes. Haywood grew up a part of the working class, and his respect for working people was genuine. He was quickly angered by the arrogance of employers "who had never ... spoken to a workingman except to give orders."
Having met Debs during his WFM days, Haywood had also become interested in the former railway leader's new passion, socialism. Haywood subscribed to the belief, and with Boyce, formulated as a new motto for the WFM, that:

Labor produces all wealth; all wealth belongs to the producer thereof.

Haywood observed how the government frequently took the side of business to defeat the tactics and the aspirations of the miners. During an 1899 organizing drive in Coeur d'Alene, with pay cuts as a motivating issue, the company hired spies and then fired organizers and pro-union miners. Some frustrated miners responded with violence and when two men were killed, martial law was declared. As they'd done in a strike in Coeur d'Alene seven years earlier, soldiers acted as strike breakers. They rounded up hundreds of union members without formal charges and put them in a filthy, vermin-infested warehouse without sanitation services for a year. They were so crowded that the soldiers locked the overflow of prisoners in boxcars. One local union leader was imprisoned for 17 years.
   In the WFM's 1903-05 struggle in Colorado, with martial law once again in force, two declarations uttered by the National Guard and recorded for posterity further clarified the relationship of the mine operator's enforcement army — provided courtesy of the Colorado governor — to the workers. When union attorneys asked the courts to free illegally imprisoned strikers, Adjutant General Sherman Bell declared, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll give 'em post mortems." Reminded of the Constitution, one of Bell's junior officers declared coolly, "To hell with the Constitution. We're not going by the Constitution." General Bell had been the manager of one of the coal mines in Cripple Creek where the strike was taking place. It wasn't any surprise to Haywood that soldiers seemed to be working in the interests of the employers; he'd seen that situation before. So the WFM took the issue to the voters, and 72 percent of the state's voters approved the referendum.
   Haywood complained that John D. Rockefeller was "wielding more power with his golf sticks than could the people of Colorado with their ballots." It appeared to Haywood that the deck was stacked, and no enduring gains could be won for the workers short of changing the rules of the game. Increasingly, his industrial unionism took on a revolutionary flavor. In 1905 Haywood joined the more left-leaning socialists, labor anarchists in the Haymarket tradition, and other militant unionists to formulate the concept of revolutionary industrial unionism that animated the Industrial Workers of the World. Haywood called this philosophy "socialism with its working clothes on."
   Haywood favored direct action. The socialist philosophy — which WFM supporter the Rev. Fr. Thomas J. Hagerty called "slowcialism" — didn't seem hard-nosed enough for Haywood's labor instincts. After the Boise murder trial, he'd come to believe,

It is to the ignominy of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party that they've so seldom joined forces with the I.W.W. in these desperate political struggles.

While Haywood continued to champion direct action, he advocated the political action favored by the socialists as just one more mechanism for change, and only when it seemed relevant. At an October 1913 meeting of the Socialist Party, Haywood stated:

I advocate the industrial ballot alone when I address the workers in the textile industries of the East where a great majority are foreigners without political representation. But when I speak to American workingmen in the West I advocate both the industrial and the political ballot.

The "industrial ballot" referred to the methods (strikes, slowdowns, etc.) of the IWW.
Haywood seemed most comfortable with a philosophy arrived at through the hard-scrabble experiences of the workers. He had the ability to translate complex economic theories into simple ideas that resonated with working people. He would frequently preface his speeches with the statement, "Tonight I'm going to speak on the class struggle and I'm going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understand it." He distilled the voluminous work of Karl Marx into a simple observation, "If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get."
Haywood demonstrated his Marxist roots when, confronted by the Commission on Industrial Relations with an argument about the sanctity of private property, he responded that a capitalist's property merely represented "unpaid labor, surplus value." But the forum also gave Haywood an opportunity to compare the philosophy of the IWW with that of Marx and the socialist parties. Reminded by the Commission that socialists advocated ownership of the industries by the state, Haywood remembered in his autobiography that he'd drawn a clear distinction. All of industry should be owned "by the workers," he observed.

Racial unity in the labor movement

Much of Haywood's philosophy relating to socialism, to the idea that industrial unionism was preferable to craft unionism, what he saw as the evils of the wage system, his attitude about corporations, militia, and politicians, seem to have been held in common with his mentor at the WFM, Ed Boyce. Boyce also called for legislation to forbid employment of aliens. Unlike Boyce and many other labor leaders and organizations of the time, Haywood believed that workers of all ethnicities should organize into the same union. According to Haywood, the IWW was "big enough to take in the black man, the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities - an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries; to obliterate national boundaries."
In 1912, Haywood spoke at a convention for the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana; at the time, interracial meetings in the state were illegal. Haywood insisted that the white workers invite the African American workers to their convention, declaring:

You work in the same mills together. Sometimes a black man and a white man chop down the same tree together. You are meeting in a convention now to discuss the conditions under which you labor. Why not be sensible about this and call the Negroes into the Convention? If it's against the law, this is one time when the law should be broken.

Ignoring the law against interracial meetings, the convention invited the African American workers. The convention would eventually vote to affiliate with the IWW.Further Information

Get more info on 'Bill Haywood'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://bill_haywood.totallyexplained.com">Bill Haywood Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.