page_title: Bill Haywood
section_title: Haywood's revolutionary imperative
hierarchical_section_title: Bill Haywood / Haywood's labor philosophy / Haywood's revolutionary imperative
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Bill Haywood, organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World, sitting at a table at a convention in Chicago in 1917.
context_page_description: William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, Haywood was involved in several important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
  Haywood was an advocate of industrial unionism, a labor philosophy that favors organizing all workers in an industry under one union, regardless of the specific trade or skill level; this was in contrast to the craft unions that were prevalent at the time, such as the AFL. He believed that workers of all ethnicities should be united, and favored direct action over political action.
  Haywood was often targeted by prosecutors due to his support for violence. An attempt to prosecute him in 1907 for his alleged involvement in the murder of Frank Steunenberg failed, but in 1918 he was one of 101 IWW members jailed for anti-war activity during the First Red Scare. He was sentenced to twenty years.
context_section_description: Haywood's industrial unionism was much broader than formulating a more effective method of conducting strikes. Haywood grew up a part of the working class, and his respect for working people was genuine. He was quickly angered by the arrogance of employers "who had never ... spoken to a workingman except to give orders." Having met Debs during his WFM days, Haywood had also become interested in the former railway leader's new passion, socialism. Haywood subscribed to the belief, and with Boyce, formulated as a new motto for the WFM, that:
  Labor produces all wealth; all wealth belongs to the producer thereof.
  Haywood observed how the government frequently took the side of business to defeat the tactics and the aspirations of the miners. During an 1899 organizing drive in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with pay cuts as a motivating issue, the company hired spies and then fired organizers and pro-union miners. Some frustrated miners responded with violence and when two men were killed, martial law was declared. As they had done in a strike in Coeur d'Alene seven years earlier, soldiers acted as strike breakers. They rounded up hundreds of union members without formal charges and put them in a filthy, vermin-infested warehouse without sanitation services for a year. They were so crowded that the soldiers locked the overflow of prisoners in boxcars. One local union leader was imprisoned for 17 years.
  Haywood considered the brutal conditions in Coeur d'Alene a manifestation of class warfare. In 1901 the miners agreed at the WFM convention that a "complete revolution of social and economic conditions" was "the only salvation of the working classes."
  In the WFM's 1903–04 struggle in Colorado, with martial law once again in force, two declarations uttered by the National Guard and recorded for posterity further clarified the relationship of the mine operator's enforcement army — provided courtesy of the Colorado governor — to the workers. When union attorneys asked the courts to free illegally imprisoned strikers, Adjutant General Sherman Bell declared, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll give 'em post mortems." Reminded of the Constitution, one of Bell's junior officers declared coolly, "To hell with the Constitution. We're not going by the Constitution."
  General Bell had been the manager of one of the coal mines in Cripple Creek where the strike was taking place. It wasn't any surprise to Haywood that soldiers seemed to be working in the interests of the employers; he had seen that situation before. But when the Colorado legislature acknowledged the complaints of organized labor and passed an eight hour law, the Colorado supreme court declared it unconstitutional. So the WFM took the issue to the voters, and 72 percent of the state's voters approved the referendum. But the Colorado government ignored the results of the referendum.
  To members of the WFM, it became clear that government favored the companies, and only direct action by organized workers could secure the eight-hour day for themselves. When miners in Idaho Springs and Telluride decided to strike for the eight-hour day, they were rounded up at gunpoint by vigilante groups and expelled from their communities. Warrants were issued for the arrest of the law-breaking vigilantes, but they were not acted upon.
  Haywood complained that John D. Rockefeller was "wielding more power with his golf sticks than could the people of Colorado with their ballots." It appeared to Haywood that the deck was stacked, and no enduring gains could be won for the workers short of changing the rules of the game. Increasingly, his industrial unionism took on a revolutionary flavor. In 1905 Haywood joined the more left-leaning socialists, labor anarchists in the Haymarket tradition, and other militant unionists to formulate the concept of revolutionary industrial unionism that animated the IWW. Haywood called this philosophy "socialism with its working clothes on."
  Haywood favored direct action. The socialist philosophy — which WFM supporter the Rev. Fr. Thomas J. Hagerty called "slowcialism" — did not seem 
caption: Haywood at a convention in Chicago (1917)
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