Bill Haywood

He was three when his father, a former Pony Express rider, died of pneumonia in Salt Lake City. At nine he was whittling a slingshot and put the knife through his right eye. He never took a glass replacement, and for the rest of his life he turned his left side to cameras. An uncle named Richard indentured him to a farm he hated, and he answered by dropping Richard from his own name and taking his dead father's instead. At 15, with almost no schooling, he went into the mines. He married Nevada Jane Minor in 1889, tried cowboying and homesteading, and was back underground by 1896. Haymarket in 1886 and the Pullman strike in 1894 had already told him what he thought about the arrangement.

On the morning of June 27, 1905, he opened the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World at Brand's Hall in Chicago, 200 delegates in the room. He wanted one union for everybody in an industry, skilled or not, against the craft unions of the AFL — and he meant everybody. In 1912 he told a Louisiana timber workers' convention to bring the Black workers in even though interracial meetings there were illegal, and they did. At Lawrence, Massachusetts, that same winter, 20,000 textile workers walked out and Haywood put their children on trains to host families in New York. When police clubbed parents and children at the Lawrence station on February 24, the national press turned on the mill owners. He led the Paterson silk strike in 1913, was arrested along with some 1,850 others, and lost.

The state came for him in February 1906. Idaho prosecutors swore falsely that he had been in the state when a bomb killed former governor Frank Steunenberg, and a special train ran him out of Denver overnight before any Colorado court could act. Colorado socialists ran him for governor from his Boise cell, and he took over 16,000 votes. Clarence Darrow got him acquitted on July 29, 1907, and the trial made him a celebrity. The celebrity made him careless. He liked the word confiscate and said so often, and newspapers quoted the line back as grounds for arresting Wobblies by the hundred. New York socialists recalled him from the party's national executive committee in 1913 by better than two to one. In 1918 Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis tried him with 100 other IWW members and gave him 20 years.

On March 31, 1921, out on appeal, he skipped bail and sailed for Soviet Russia, forfeiting a wealthy supporter's 15,000-dollar bond and leaving his co-defendants to their sentences. His own attorney said he had finished himself with the labor movement. He advised Lenin's government on labor until 1923 and helped found an industrial colony in the Kuznetsk Basin. Visitors to his small Moscow apartment found him lonely and wanting to come home. He married a Russian woman in 1926 with no shared language. He died in a Moscow hospital on May 18, 1928, at 59, of a stroke brought on by alcoholism and diabetes. Half his ashes went into the Kremlin wall and half to Chicago, near the Haymarket monument.

Bill Haywood's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Industrial Workers of the World company
  One union for an entire industry, open to every race and nationality 1905
• Industrial Socialism book
  Written with Frank Bohn for Charles H. Kerr in Chicago 1911
• The General Strike speech
  Delivered March 16, 1911, and printed as a pamphlet 1911
• One Big Union or Transformed AF of L? other
  His debate with Morris Hillquit, serialized in the Chicago Daily Socialist 1912
• The Lawrence children's exodus other
  Strikers' children sent by train to host families, a first in American labor 1912
• Bill Haywood's Book book
  His autobiography, published the year after he died 1929

• 1878 aged ~9 Blinds his right eye at nine while carving a slingshot He refused a glass eye and posed in left profile ever after.
• 1884 aged ~15 Goes into the mines at 15 with almost no schooling
• 1896 aged ~27 Hears Ed Boyce speak at an Idaho silver mine and joins the Western Federation of Miners
• June 27, 1905 aged 36 Opens the first convention of the Industrial Workers of the World Two hundred delegates at Brand's Hall in Chicago.
• February 17, 1906 aged 37 Seized in Denver and run to Idaho overnight on a special train The extradition papers falsely placed him in Idaho at the time of the murder.
• July 29, 1907 aged 38 Acquitted in Boise after Clarence Darrow's defense The jury deliberated nine hours.
• February 24, 1912 aged 43 Police club strikers' children at the Lawrence railroad station The newspapers turned on the mill owners and the strike was won.
• 1918 aged ~49 Convicted with 100 other Wobblies under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 20 years The trial before Judge Landis ran five months, the longest to that date.
• March 31, 1921 aged 52 Skips bail and sails for Soviet Russia A 15,000-dollar bond posted by William Bross Lloyd was forfeited.

• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. co-founder and ally
• Elizabeth Gurley Flynn 1890–1964
  Organized IWW strikes and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. organized beside him at Lawrence and Paterson
• Samuel Gompers 1850–1924
  Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization. rival model of unionism
• Mother Jones 1837–1930
  Organizer whose militant campaigns for miners and against child labor made her an icon of American labor. fellow agitator in the mine wars
• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. prosecuted under his administration
• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. radical contemporary