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HAYWOOD, WILLIAM "BIG BILL" 1869-1928

LABOR LEADER

Out of the Mines

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, William Hay-wood experienced a difficult early life, losing his father at the age of three, obtaining minimal formal education, and working for wages as an adolescent. At fifteen he became a miner and in 1896 joined the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the era's preeminent radical labor union, in Silver City, Idaho. He served as secretary and president of his local chapter and in 1900 was promoted to the union's general executive board. In 1901 he moved to Denver where he served as editor of the WFM's journal and as secretary-treasurer. Within the radical milieu of the Denver headquarters, Haywood received an education in class struggle and socialism.

IWW Leader

Between 1903 and 1905 Haywood participated in one of the most violent incidents in American labor history. The WFM waged a bitter conflict with mining and smelting corporations in Colorado that degenerated into a war between miners and state militia. Haywood's experiences with "class warfare" in Colorado convinced him that American workers must unite into "one big union." Thus, in 1905 he, along with Eugene Debs, presided at the founding convention of the Indus-trial Workers of the World (IWW). That convention made Haywood one of the nation's best-known labor radicals, a man described as possessing two rare qualities, "genuine power and genuine simplicity."

Advocate for Revolution

In 1906 Idaho imprisoned Haywood for alleged complicity in the murder of former governor Frank Steunenberg. The ensuing sensational trial, in which he was defended by Clarence Darrow, ended with Haywood's acquittal. He then became a leader of the Socialist Party of America. But in a party opposed to violence and dedicated to respectability, Hay-wood advised socialists and workers to practice sabotage and risk imprisonment to foster revolution. In 1912 he was recalled from the Socialist Party's National Executive Committee by a vote of its members. The most significant phase of Haywood's career came between 1911 and 1918. He succeeded to the highest office in the IWW and directed the organization's growth among western agricultural, timber, and mine workers during World War I.

Exile

Because strikes threatened the war effort, the federal government arrested all the leaders of the IWW in 1917 and charged them with violating espionage and sedition acts. Haywood and a hundred others went on trial in Chicago. The jury found them all guilty, and the judge sentenced Haywood to twenty years in prison. While released on bail Haywood jumped bond and fled to the Soviet Union. There he led an unhappy life, an alien in Lenin's and Stalin's Russia. He wrote his autobiography, Bill Haywood's Book (1929) and died on 18 May 1928 in a Moscow hospital.