(1869-1928)

One of the foremost labor radicals of the American West, "Big Bill"
Haywood became a leading figure in labor activities across the United
States.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1869, Haywood had a difficult life. He was
only three years old when his father died, and at age nine he both lost
an eye and for the first time worked in a mine. The economic
desperation which led him to work as a child prevented him from ever
receiving much formal education.

In 1884, Haywood became an underground miner at the Eagle Canyon
mine in Nevada. After a brief stint as a cowboy and a failed
homesteading effort, he returned to mining in 1896, this time in Silver
City, Idaho. Here he began his labor career as a founding member of a
local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the
industry-wide union that had been founded in 1893 in Butte, Montana.
Haywood rose quickly in the union ranks, becoming secretary and
president of his local, joining the national union's General Executive
Board in 1900, and editing the union's magazine and serving as
secretary-treasurer in 1901.

Just as Haywood became one of the leaders of Western unions, labor
relations in Colorado exploded into violence. Motivated largely by harsh
working conditions, similar to the mines of Butte, Montana, the WFM
launched a series of mining strikes in Colorado beginning in 1901. The
next several years saw near warfare in Colorado's mining fields. The
defeat of the strikes led Haywood to stress the need for "one big union"
which could bring broader support to individual labor struggles;
accordingly, in 1905 he played a key role in the founding of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), commonly referred to as "the Wobblies."

The next year Haywood was charged with plotting the murder of a
former Idaho governor. The jury acquitted Haywood, but businessmen
and fellow labor leaders would continue to fear and even hate Haywood
for his alleged endorsement of violence and sabotage. In 1915, he
became the formal head of the IWW and helped to direct strikes from
New Jersey to Washington State.

From 1905 to 1920, the IWW organized hundreds of thousands of workers
in mines, lumberyards, farms and factories; it never had more than
about 150,000 members at any one time, but over 3 million people joined
at one time or another. The IWW was strongest in the West, where it
organized women and men, African-Americans and whites, recent
immigrants and native-born Americans into large industry-wide
unions. Wobblies were explicit about their eventual goal of toppling
capitalism, and many of their leaders, including Haywood, expressed
open admiration for the young Soviet Union. Wobblies quickly became a
part of the folklore of the West, celebrated for their staunch
egalitarianism and no-holds-barred style.

The domestic repression which World War I brought ultimately crushed
both Haywood and the IWW. In 1917, the federal government arrested
Haywood and one hundred others and charged them with violating
espionage and sedition acts for calling strikes during wartime. All were
convicted. When the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in 1921,
Haywood jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928.