Newsinger John - The revolutionary journalism of Big Bill Haywood: on the picket line with the IWW

The Revolutionary Journalism of Big Bill Haywood:

On the Picket Line with the IWW

Edited and introduced by John Newsinger

About the author

J OHN N EWSINGER is Professor of History at Bath Spa University and a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has been a senior shop steward in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW), a school rep in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and branch chair in the University and College Union (UCU). He is the author of numerous books including Orwells Politics (Macmillan, 2000), Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s (Bookmarks, 2012), The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples History of the British Empire (Bookmarks, 2013), Jim Larkin & the Great Dublin Lockout of 1913 (Bookmarks, 2014) and British Counterinsurgency (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Edited and introduced by John Newsinger

The Revolutionary Journalism of Big Bill Haywood:

On the Picket Line with the IWW

Edited and introduced by John Newsinger

Published by Bookmarks Publications

C/O 1 Bloomsbury Street

London WC1B 3QE

Cover by Ben Windsor

Typeset by Peter Robinson

Printed by Melita Bress

ISBN 978-1-910885-30-7 (pbk)

978-1-910885-31-4 (Kindle)

978-1-910885-32-1 (ePub)

978-1-910885-33-8 (PDF)

I am not a law-abiding citizen. And more than that, no socialist can be a law-abiding citizen It is our purpose to overthrow the capitalist system by forcible means if necessary.
Big Bill Haywood, Cooper Union, New York, 21 December 1911

In his autobiography, My Shaping Up Years, the radical labour journalist Art Shields remembered Big Bill Haywood. As he recalled, everything about him was big The bigness wasnt just in height and breadth of shoulders, nor in his voice that rolled like a big brass drum. I felt as I looked and listened that I was in the presence of workers power Big Bill was a compelling speaker.

According to Len De Caux, a veteran of both the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the later Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Haywoods oratorybreathed fight into large numbers of workers engaged in struggle. He was both the practical union organizer and above all the fighting leader to whom embattled workers responded most in turbulent times.

Haywood was to first achieve prominence as one of the leaders of the militant Western Federation of Miners (WFM), then as a leading figure in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and as one of the leaders of the revolutionary IWW. His career as a revolutionary saw him lead massive struggles, confronting employers, private detectives, police, troops, vigilantes and the US government. He was beaten, imprisoned and finally, in 1921, driven into exile in the recently established Soviet Union.

This book collects most of the journalism that he produced for the monthly Marxist journal, the International Socialist Review (ISR), between the summer of 1910 and the end of 1917 (he actually joined its editorial board in October 1911). In the pages of this quite remarkable publication, he chronicled the class struggle not just in New York, Lawrence, Little Falls, Paterson, and Butte, but also in Britain and Ireland. He expounded the principles of the IWW and he defended the organisation against its critics, including the British syndicalist Tom Mann. His last contribution to the journal, Inside, described his arrest and imprisonment as one of one hundred and sixty-three members of the IWW who either have been or will be arrested in what was to become the great Chicago trial of the unions leading activists, the US governments determined attempt to destroy the IWW once and for all. Haywood proclaimed his defiance: By our union we shall triumph.

Big Bill

But who was Big Bill Haywood? He was born in Salt Lake City on 4 February 1869, the son of a miner. His father died when he was three and his mother got remarried to another miner. At the age of nine young Bill accompanied his stepfather to his first paid employment down a hard-rock mine. He lost an eye in an accident. In 1880, he was indentured as a farm labourer, but eventually escaped from what he regarded as little better than slavery, to return to mining in Nevada in 1884. He joined the WFM in 1896, quickly becoming secretary of Local 66 in Silver City, Idaho, and in 1900 was elected onto the unions executive board. The following year he was elected Secretary Treasurer of what was arguably the most militant and democratic labour organisation in the United States. Not only was the WFM committed, at this time, to public ownership of the means of production and the abolition of the wages system, giving its support to the Socialist Party, but it regularly urged its members to arm themselves for the struggle. Under the leadership of its president, Ed Boyce, and with Haywood as his lieutenant, the WFM went from strength to strength, increasing membership to over 40,000 by 1903.

The mine owners made determined efforts to crush the WFM over the years with strikes and lockouts that often looked more like small wars than industrial disputes. The owners had their own private armies of gunmen who carried out beatings and shootings and, when necessary, troops would be deployed by compliant state governors, martial law imposed and mass arrests and deportations carried out. The union fought back. Later in 1903, the union was involved in efforts to organise the mills in Colorado City, calling the workers out on strike on 14 February.

Only one company, Standard, refused to recognise the union and so the miners in the Cripple Creek district came out in sympathy, cutting off ore supplies in order to force the firm to terms. Miners walked out in sympathy with mill workers in a great display of working class solidarity. Solidarity was, of course, to become one of the hallmarks of the IWW. The miners walked out on 8 August and, in the words of historian Melvyn Dubofsky, unleashed one of the most brutal class conflicts in American history, a conflict that quickly developed into a full-scale civil war between mine workers and the state of Colorado. He was determined to break the union by any means necessary.

Haywood was as much in the firing line as the rank and file. He routinely went armed, as did many of the strikers, and sometimes had to use his guns as well as his fists.

One point worth making here is that the violence that employers and the state government used against the striking miners in Colorado was by no means unprecedented. In fact, right across the country employers were prepared to use lethal force to prevent unionisation, making use of their own armed police, of private detective agencies, of the local police and when necessary of troops. These methods were used to defeat not just militant trade unionism, but all efforts at union

The employers attempted to discredit the union by portraying it as always the initiator of violence rather than the respondent, accusing union members of attacks that had never taken place and even faking attacks, carrying out dynamite attacks, for example, which could then be blamed on the union and provide justification for further repression. Bill Moyer, who had succeeded Boyce as President of the WFM was, on one occasion, arrested and charged with murder, but had to be released because neither a body nor even the name of the alleged victim nor the place or the date the killing had supposedly taken place could be produced. Instead he was charged with desecrating the US flag and held in jail, awaiting trial, successfully removing him from the struggle. On 21 November, an explosion at the Vindicator mine killed two men and was inevitably blamed on the union even though it was a routine industrial accident. And later, the case against union men charged with attempting to derail a train collapsed when it became clear in court that the whole episode was the work of private detectives working for the mine owners and attempting to discredit the union.