Haywood, William D.

HAYWOOD, WILLIAM D. (1869–1928). William D. “Big Bill” Haywood became the leader and symbol of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during its brief heyday as a significant labor organization in the United States.

William Dudley Haywood was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His mother was from South Africa and his father, who died when Haywood was three, had worked as a miner in Kentucky and as a rider for the Pony Express. As a child, Haywood worked a variety of marginal jobs in order to survive. In 1884, at the age of fifteen, he gained employment as a miner’s helper in Nevada, where he also learned the rudiments of industrial unionism and the principles of socialism from a member of the Knights of Labor. He soon married Nevada Jane Minor, a rancher’s daughter, and filed a claim for a homestead near the Idaho border. The land was lost, however, when the federal government recalled it for use as an Indian reservation. With his wife ailing with chronic arthritis, Haywood returned to mining and settled in Silver City, Idaho, a silver-mining town in the southwest corner of state.

Haywood soon emerged as the leader of the local branch of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in Silver City. He possessed excellent administrative skills and played a leading role in managing the town and the local hospital, while peacefully negotiating with employers. In recognition of his success, the WFM brought Haywood to Denver in 1901 to serve as secretary-treasurer of the national body. The move coincided with a new campaign by Western state governments and mine owners to break the power of the union in the region’s mines, mills, and smelters. At six feet tall, and well over two hundred pounds, Haywood quickly earned a reputation as a resolute crisis leader. He went about his rounds armed with a revolver, ready to exchange epithets and blows in his capacity as a militant socialist and editor of the Miner’s Magazine. However, Haywood was also a heavy drinker and a womanizer, and it was not very long before he and his wife, a recent Christian Science convert, became estranged.

In 1905, Haywood was the keynote speaker at the founding convention of the IWW in Chicago, which he deemed “the Continental Congress of the working class” during his speech. Not surprisingly, the ruling authorities quickly took notice and sought to curtail his activities on behalf of the working class. At the end of December in 1905, the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was killed by a bomb that exploded as he opened the front gate to his house in Caldwell, Idaho. Steuenberg had worked diligently against organized labor in the Gem State, particularly the WFM. Although Haywood was in Colorado at the time and the man who planted the bomb, Harry Orchard, confessed to the crime, Idaho’s legal officials sought to link the murder to the WFM. Haywood and two other men were secretly extradited by extralegal means in March of 1906 and indicted for Steunenberg’s murder. After more than a year in the Boise prison for their alleged crime, Haywood and Moyer were finally put on trial, with Clarence Darrow acting as their defense attorney. The case drew national attention and caused considerable embarrassment for the prosecutors when the jury acquitted Haywood and Moyer in the summer of 1907. (A third defendant was acquitted the following January.) Shortly after, Haywood’s relationship with the WFM ended when he and Moyer had a falling out, the causes of which remain unclear.

Now a radical cause célèbre, Haywood entered a considerably wider world of agitation. Vaudeville operators offered him thousands of dollars a week to appear in their venues. Haywood, who ran as the socialist candidate for governor of Colorado while in prison, chose to become a lecturer for the Socialist Party of America (SP) instead. 25,000 at another in nearby Milwaukee. He also contributed to the International Socialist Review, which supported the “revolutionist” wing of the SP. He was elected to its national executive committee and twice represented the organization at meetings of the Second International. During the course of championing the socialist cause abroad, he met many prominent revolutionaries, trade unionists, and intellectuals. Among these were George Bernard Shaw, V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Ramsay MacDonald, Jean Jaurès, and Clara Zetkin. Haywood also addressed large gatherings in Scandinavia and Great Britain.

By 1912, Haywood also served as an organizer-at-large for the IWW. That same year he played the leading role in the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts and in other historic, but unsuccessful Wobbly-led strikes in Akron, Ohio, and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913. Although a favorite of the fashionable Greenwich Village Left of Mabel Dodge and John Reed, Haywood also irritated some “reformist” SP leaders such as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger. They disapproved of his disdain for their electoral approach to socialism and his militant rhetoric in support of sabotage, which they considered to be an endorsement of violence. In truth, Haywood never completely rejected electoral politics, but he believed a revolution could only come to pass through true industrial unionism, only by workers at the point of production working through their industrial unions.

When socialist expectations for the election of 1912 were unrealized, reformers in the SP blamed the shortfall on the public’s association of the Party with the IWW. In early 1913, they arranged to recall Haywood from his party office, their primary complaint being his refusal to completely disavow the use of sabotage. Haywood did not resist. However, he soon succeeded Vincent St. John as secretary-treasurer of the IWW and led the union to significant organizational successes, especially among loggers, copper miners, and migrant farm workers. Just as the IWW ascended and reached a peak membership of approximately 100,000, the United States began a “preparedness” campaign during WWI. American intervention soon followed, a move which presented the IWW with a serious challenge. The union opposed the war but, largely at Haywood’s behest, did not openly agitate against it or prohibit members from complying with the draft. Nevertheless, politicians, patriotic organizations, employers’ associations, and vigilantes attacked the union and its leaders as disloyal, treasonous, and dangerous. A series of raids in 1917 and 1918 resulted in the indictment of Haywood and most of the union’s leadership under the Sedition Act. After a long and celebrated trial in Chicago, and a noticeable lack of evidence, Haywood was fined of $20,000 and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Ironically, Haywood had urged members of the IWW to submit to arrest and a mass trial, convinced that the government’s case would collapse and the subsequent victory would launch an era of renewed IWW growth. Nonetheless, in March 1921, with the denial of his court appeal, his strategy discredited, and his health failing due to diabetes, Haywood jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union. His co-defendants were left to languish in prison and IWW morale was shattered. Although, many individuals would later remember him affectionately and excuse his action without justifying it, his influence on the American Left immediately plummeted.

Haywood’s years in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928 have long been a subject of dispute among left-wing circles. Opponents of the Communist Party claimed that Haywood was unhappy in Moscow and disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. Others have written that his major problems in the Soviet Union had more to do with his poor health. What is clear is that after a stint as the director of a factory complex, Haywood lived in Moscow at the Lux Hotel. He managed to maintain his drinking habit and even married a Russian woman. He also hung out with journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times and radicals like Harry Haywood (no relation), who had come to study in the Soviet Union. He was not entirely idle politically. James Cannon credited him with launching the idea for the International Labor Defense and Harry Haywood later stated that Big Bill often met with Moscow-based Communists to discuss political issues. While in Moscow, Haywood wrote his autobiography, Bill Haywood’s Book, a work that remains the subject of partisan debate. Some critics reject it as inauthentic, or purposefully edited to serve the agenda of the Communist Party. Regardless, Haywood’s health steadily deteriorated and after two strokes in the spring of 1928, he died on 18 May. He was interred in the Kremlin wall.

Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Conlin, Joseph R. Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Labor Movement. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. “Big Bill” Haywood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.

Haywood, William D. Bill Haywood’s Book. New York: International Publishers, 1929.

Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Touchstone, 1997.