The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-05-01
Reviewed by VERN SMITH.

Reviewed by VERN SMITH.
For a quarter Of century big,
powerful man with one eye, voice
that swayed open air audiences of
$4,000 or so, and knack for know
ing what to do next when strike
situation, defense campaign or an
organization drive was in it's hot
test fight, STROBE through the pages
of American labor history, and
made them glow as they never did
before. That man was big Bill'
Haywood.
Half of his ashes lie under the
Kremlin Wall at Moscow, the cap
ital of the first workers. republic,
and such commonwealth of labor
as Bill Haywood fought for decades
to accomplish. Half Of his ashes he
willed should lie in Waldheim Gene
terry in Chicago, where are buried
the Haymarket victims, the men
whose hanging Haywood read about
in the newspapers, when he was
about II years old, working as
metal miner in Nevada. Pondering
over the Haymarket affair, Hay
wood says in his autobiography, did
much to make him a revolutionist.
But Haywood did not write just
treatise on revolution. He lived the
revolution. His life was a burst Of
activity from day to day, and even
when he was in prison, waiting trial
for murder-thc usual frame-up on
g rather grander scale than usual
he made a garden, and wrote propa-
Ganda articles.
The earlier pages of his bool,
give a vivid picture Of the Rocky
Mountain region during his youth;
Mormons, (He was born in Salt
Lake City,, the Mountain Meadow
Massacre Gle lived with its perpe-
trators), the massacre of the Pluto
Indians by the whites (He heard
about it from both the lone survivor
end the white murderers), many
stories of hardship and struggle
among cowboys and miners (Some
of them as romantic as fiction), and
Haywood's own participation in this
carly life.
Haywood, like most proletarian
leaders, was as different from the
regular bourgeois fictionist's idea of
radical, dreaming of utopias and
without interest in practical" things
as you could well imagine. His book
reveals him as intensely interested
in every day life, watching kecnly
the growth of giant industry, watch
ing the weird chances that govern
prospector's discoveries (He came
within an inch of owning one Of the
biggest mines in the Rockies by
right of discovery, observing the
prehistoric reptiles tracks that mark
trail across the yard Of Western
penitentiary and disappear under
q million years of rock, interested
even in the technique of obstetrics,
for he tells how he acted as midwife
when his child was born, on lonely
homestead that failed as most other
komesteads did at that time.
Haywood tells of working as mes
senger boy, laborer, farmer, cow
boy, assayer (all his life he remem-
bered the details and formula used
j that trade) but mostly as miner,
until he left his last job as a ma
chine driller, on the 1000 foot level
Of the Blaine mine in Silver City
to go as a board member to the
Western Federation of Miners con-
vention in Denver, and to take the
secretary -treasurership Of the w. F.
M. short time later.
In this book he tells at first hand,
with color and fire, but in a mar
rative CT brea!s-neck speed the labor
history he made from that Denver
convention, in 1899 almost TO the