William Dudley (“Big Bill”) Haywood

• Big Bill Haywood
• Born: February 4, 1869
• Died: May 28, 1928

American labor leader and radical, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of a workingman who traced his ancestry back to colonial New England. Haywood’s mother was a young woman whose father had served in the British Colonial Office in South Africa and subsequently emigrated to the United States. When Haywood was only three years old his father died. Four years later, his mother married a hard-rock miner in Ophir, Utah.

Little in the way of reliable information exists about Haywood’s early life. Part of a large, poor family that numbered one sister, two half-brothers, and two half-sisters, Haywood had only a rudimentary elementary education and began wage work quite young. When he was nine, his stepfather took him to work in the mines for the first time. Over the next six years, as the family moved back and forth between Ophir and Salt Lake City, Haywood toiled at the sort of odd jobs available to a boy passing from childhood to adolescence. Finally, at the age of fifteen, he turned to mining, his primary occupation until 1901, when he became a full-time, paid trade union official.

In 1889, then a skilled miner employed in the Bingham Canyon, Utah, copper mines, Haywood married “Nevada Jane” Minor, whom he had first met while employed temporarily on a farm-ranch in Nevada. During the first six years of his married life, Haywood lacked steady employment and tried his hand at real estate, farming, surveying, and several other vocations. His first daughter, Vern Florence, was born in 1892, and the birth coincided with a setback to his wife’s health.

On October 20, 1895, the Haywood family moved to Silver City, Idaho, from which point it is much easier to follow his life and career. In Silver City, he went to work in the Blaine Mine, and for six years he worked in the same pit for the same company, becoming a highly skilled miner and a respected local citizen. In 1897, a second daughter, Henrietta Ruth, was born, after which Jane Haywood’s health failed badly. Confined to a bed or a wheelchair, she became unable to hold her husband’s attention or affections. Thereafter, Haywood sought comfort and solace from other women and in alcohol. Although he did not openly leave his wife and children until after 1908 (no evidence exists of a legal divorce), the marriage was no longer a real union.

It was in Silver City that Haywood first encountered the American labor movement. On August 10, 1896, he became a charter member of the Silver City local of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), soon feared as the most radical and militant union in the nation. Haywood proved himself a loyal union man, one well thought of by fellow miners, who elected him to office regularly and to the local union presidency in 1900. He kept records neatly and efficiently, recruited nearly every miner to the union, and bargained amicably and successfully with mine operators. Indeed, the manager of the Blaine Mine described Haywood as a “model citizen.”

But Haywood’s outward appearance as a moderate and responsible trade unionist cloaked a tempestuous personality and a radical temperament. Ed Boyce, the WFM president, who had originally recruited Haywood for the union and who was largely responsible for making the WFM a militant, socialist organization, recognized a kindred spirit. Boyce encouraged his young follower to serve as a delegate to the 1898 WFM national convention and promoted Haywood’s election as a General Executive Board member in 1900.

A year later Haywood left Silver City for Denver, the headquarters of the WFM, and full-time union work, never to return to the mines. In quick succession, Haywood edited the union’s official journal, The Miner’s Magazine, and served as the WFM’s secretary-treasurer. As editor, he grew from an awkward writer to a master of the philippic phrase and the caustic comment. He also evolved from an advocate of business unionism and cooperation with the American Federation of Labor to a passionate fighter for socialism and critic of AFL leader Samuel Gompers and conservative unionism. As a WFM official, Haywood experienced a late but intensive education in the meaning of the class struggle and the necessity for the cooperative commonwealth, a concept of industrial production under socialism.

Under the joint stewardship of Boyce and Haywood the WFM thrived. Radicalism proved no impediment to its growth, as the union expanded more rapidly between 1900 and 1903 that at any other time in its history. If, by 1903, Haywood had matured from a local union exponent of “pure and simple” principles to a national officer expounding industrial unionism and political socialism, he nevertheless seemed basically to be a capable, responsible trade unionist. Yet, in February 1902, he foretold his own end as a typical union official. Writing in The Miner’s Magazine, Haywood noted that the agitator “is the advance agent of social improvement and fully realizes that reforms are not achieved by conservative methods.”

Only a year later the class struggle between miners and mine operators in Colorado transformed Haywood from a rhetorical radical into a revolutionary activist. The Cripple Creek war of 1903-05—in which a militia officer declared publicly, “To hell with the Constitution,” and the governor supplied state troops and Pinker-ton detectives to the mine owners—taught Haywood new lessons. He came to believe that the state and capitalism were indistinguishable, that politics, legislation, and education were not panaceas, and that revolution was the only hope for workers. The Colorado conflict (as he told a federal investigating commission ten years later) convinced him and fellow WFM officers of the need for American labor to get together into “one big union.” Thus did Haywood and other radicals convene in Chicago in June 1905 to found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members later bore the nickname “Wobblies.”

Chairman of the IWW’s founding convention, its keynoter, and later its eulogizer, Haywood epitomized the spirit of the new organization. From the moment he called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” he addressed the need to emancipate all workers from the thrall of capitalism. He besought the delegates to create an organization for the unskilled, the unorganized, the powerless. “What I want to see,” he declared, “is an uplifting of the fellow that is down in the gutter . . . realizing that society can be no better than its most miserable.” The delegates followed the advice of the chair, creating the IWW as an organization for precisely those workers, the great mass neglected by the mainstream American labor movement.

The 1905 founding convention of the IWW made Haywood a nationally known and admired labor radical. His physical appearance proclaimed his strength. Well over six feet tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, ample in girth, blind in one eye, Haywood in his platform demeanor bore witness to struggle and suffering. Neither a rhetorician nor a spellbinder, he addressed audiences in a simple, colloquial manner. André Tridon, a close observer of Haywood’s style at mass rallies, noted that stripping him “of all the attributes which usually enable labor leaders to lead, we end by finding in him two qualities, rare ones, genuine power and genuine simplicity.”

Yet Haywood’s sudden rise to radical prominence was almost immediately ended. On December 30, 1905, a former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, who had been involved in the repression of an 1899 WFM strike, was assassinated. Two days later authorities apprehended the suspected assassin, one Harry Orchard, who soon confessed to the crime and numerous other murders, all, he alleged, committed at the order of Haywood and a WFM “inner circle.” On February 17, 1906, Pinker-tons arrested Haywood, Charles Moyer (president of the WFM), and George Pettibone (a close friend of the WFM leaders) in Denver and placed them on a special train to Idaho, where they were imprisoned and, in March, indicted for murder. For the next year the three men remained in jail without bond while the authorities sought evidence to corroborate Orchard’s confession.

The case became a cause célèbre for radicals. Eugene V. Debs, in a famous newspaper editorial, called for a mass uprising if Haywood was convicted. Other left-wing labor groups and socialists raised defense funds. And Clarence Darrow, the labor lawyer, went to Idaho to lead the defense. Now a prospective martyr for radicalism, Haywood became even more widely known nationally and internationally. His arrest and incarceration heightened his radicalism and intensified his commitment to socialism. Indeed, while still in prison in November 1906, he ran as the Socialist party candidate for governor of Colorado. Finally, in May 1907, he was brought to trial and acquitted, partly because Orchard’s confession was uncorroborated and partly because Orchard’s testimony proved contradictory under cross-examination.

But Haywood regained his freedom a union leader without an organization, an agitator without an immediate cause. He and the WFM had come to a parting of the ways by 1908, and he then felt no strong attraction to the IWW. Instead he worked for the Socialist party, playing an active role in Debs’s 1908 “Red Special” campaign for the presidency. As a reward, socialists elected Haywood to the party’s national executive committee in 1909, and the following year sent him to Copenhagen as an American delegate to the Congress of the Second International.

Even as a socialist, however, Haywood dissented. In a party that, by and large, opposed all forms of violence, counseled esteem for the law, and sought respectability, he endorsed violations of “capitalist law,” sabotage, and nonpolitical direct action. “I despise the law, I am not a law-abiding citizen,” Haywood declaimed before one socialist audience. Those who have suffered imprisonment, he told less intransigent socialists, “despise your hypocrisy. We are the revolution!” Such flouting of convention led the dominant faction in the party to seek his recall from the executive committee, a goal they accomplished in 1913.

By then, however, Haywood had already transferred his enthusiasm from the Socialist party to the IWW. Initially reassociating himself with the IWW in December 1910, Haywood grew ever more involved with the organization, now led by his former colleague in the WFM, Vincent St. John, and practicing direct mass action in preference to parliamentary politics. Like Haywood, most Wobblies openly proclaimed their abomination of the law and the sanctity of private property. Finding a more congenial institutional setting for his personality and talents, Haywood began the most significant phase of his public career. In an organization renowned for its colorful figures, Haywood proved the most charismatic of all.

The 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike and the 1913 Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers’ strike found Haywood in the forefront of the struggles. His aphorisms—”You can’t weave cloth with bayonets” and “Industrial unionism is socialism with its working clothes on”—became radical clichés. New York intellectuals and bohemians lionized him, and in 1913-14 he acted as the star proletarian performer at arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Fifth Avenue salon.

When St. John resigned the highest office in the IWW in 1914, Haywood succeeded him. Repeating his earlier experiences as a union officer in the WFM, Haywood ran the IWW efficiently and successfully. He rationalized and centralized administration of the IWW, substituted careful organizational drives for theatrical gestures, and sought immediate reforms rather than elusive utopias. Never had Haywood seemed happier than in early spring 1917, as from his Chicago office he directed successful IWW organizing drives among migratory harvesters, Northwestern loggers, and Western copper miners.

But the same factors that produced growth for the IWW and contentment for Haywood—World War I-induced prosperity and a tight domestic labor market—also spelled tragedy for the radical organization and its leader. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, IWW strikes menaced not only private profits but also national security. As such strikes impeded the production of wheat, lumber, and copper—all vital war products—in the summer of 1917, a surging wave of private and public hostility toward the IWW crested. Finally, on September 5, 1917, agents of the Justice Department raided IWW headquarters, seizing every document and artifact they could lay their hands on. Sorting through tons of confiscated materials, the Justice Department assembled the evidence to indict IWW leaders for violation of the wartime espionage and sedition acts.

By late 1917 every IWW official, including Haywood, was in prison as part of a federal operation that one United States attorney admitted was aimed at putting the IWW out of business. At a trial in Chicago in April-May 1918, the jury convicted 101 IWW leaders, all of whom were fined and sentenced to long terms in federal prison.

Released on bail early in 1919, as the IWW appealed the 1918 convictions, Haywood toured the country, speaking in defense of the IWW prisoners and raising funds for their legal defense. By then, he seemed a mere shell of his former self, the strain of the trial, his incarceration, and alcoholism having aggravated his diabetic condition and weakened his liver. When in April 1921 the IWW’s last legal appeal failed, Haywood, unlike the vast majority of convicted Wobblies, refused to surrender. Instead, he jumped bail, disappeared, and later that same year reappeared publicly as an exile in the Soviet Union.

The factors that prompted Haywood to choose political exile over domestic imprisonment remain enigmatic. So does his life in Russia. For a short time, he directed a labor project in the Kuznets district, but by 1923 his dream, if he had ever had one, of building a Wobbly utopia in Russia had dissolved. He never really fitted into Lenin’s model for a new and better world. Tired and sick, he retired to a room in Moscow’s Lux Hotel, where he occasionally entertained visiting former Wobblies and American leftists. He apparently also married a Russian woman.

Increasingly ill and frequently hospitalized, Haywood tried to keep abreast of events in America and to complete, with the help of Louise Bryant as ghostwriter, a romanticized and often inaccurate autobiography. In May 1928, at the age of fifty-nine, he died in a Moscow hospital. Russian officials placed some of his ashes alongside those of the American Communist John Reed in the Kremlin wall; the remainder went to Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago to be placed near the graves of the 1886 Haymarket riot martyrs.

William D. Haywood was a leader condemned by Theodore Roosevelt as an undesirable citizen, admired by Frank Walsh as a “rugged intellectual,” despised by Samuel Gompers as a smasher of trade unions, and adored by radical associates as an effective administrator and talented organizer. His life was a tale of inconsistencies. Like most Wobblies, he was neither an original thinker nor a logical theoretician. He followed no pattern. Rather than moving along the usual trajectory from youthful radicalism to middle-aged conservatism, Haywood began his union career as a moderate, found success and fame, and became more radical with age. A man of many talents, he developed none to the fullest.

The man The Nation described in a poignant obituary as most comfortable “standing up before a mass of unskilled workers, preaching the eternal irreconcilability of employer and employed with one breath and the brotherhood of man with the next” spent his declining years in lonely exile isolated from the strike crowds he had stirred to action. An unhappy expatriate, he neither served American radicalism nor built a new society in his adopted land. But Haywood’s life and career disclose the indigenous roots of American working-class radicalism as well as the forms of repression often employed against the domestic adversaries of a liberal democracy.

No central body of Haywood papers exists. The fullest collection of IWW records, which includes many Haywood items, is located at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. Not always accurate but containing much information not available elsewhere is Haywood’s ghostwritten autobiography, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (1929, 1958). For Haywood’s own ideas, see F. Borhn and W. D. Haywood, Industrial Socialism (1911) and W. D. Haywood, “Socialism: The Hope of the Working Class, International Socialist Review, February 1912. The only scholarly, full-length biography is J. R. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (1969). For a briefer, interpretive sketch of his life see M. Dubofsky, “The Radicalism of the Dispossessed: William Haywood and the IWW,” in A. F. Young, ed., Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (1968). An extensive body of literature treats the history of Haywood and the IWW; the most useful sources are J. P. Conlin, Bread and Roses Too (1970); M. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (1969); P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4—The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (1965); and P. Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (1967). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). One of the best obituaries appeared in The Nation, May 30, 1928.