Union Organizers
Two of the most outspoken supporters of Joe Hill during the months leading to his execution were
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (center) and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood (far right).
(Courtesy: Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs,
Wayne State University)
Flynn was a fiery orator and determined organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, who met
Hill after his murder conviction. Flynn and Hill developed a deep, though short-lived, relationship
through the exchange of numerous letters while he was on death row. Haywood, born in the mining
camp of Bingham, Utah, urged Hill to appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hill told Haywood
not to waste the money. On the eve of his execution, Hill telegraphed Haywood a goodbye message,
urging him to move on: "Don't waste time mourning -- Organize!"
William D. Haywood and the Radical Labor
Movement
William D. Haywood is widely considered one of the foremost and
most feared of America's labor leaders. Tall and gruff, "Big" Bill
was a fiery speaker, powerful organizer and uninhibited critic of
government and big business.
Haywood was born in Salt Lake City in 1869, the year the
transcontinental railroad was linked in Utah at Promontory Summit.
Brigham Young was still serving as President of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when Haywood was born in
Bingham Canyon, the son of a former Pony Express rider. At the
age of nine Haywood punctured his right eye in a whittling
accident. For the rest of his life, Haywood would offer his left
profile to photographers in an effort to hide his blind eye.
Before his tenth birthday Haywood had left school and entered the
mines to help support his family.
While working in a silver mine in northern Idaho in 1896,
Haywood was exposed to the unionizing efforts of the Western
Federation of Miners. After a meeting with WFM organizer Ed
Boyce, Haywood threw himself into union membership and
activities. Within a few years he was serving as Secretary-Treasurer
of the WFM, and traveling throughout the West as a union
organizer. Because of increasing conflicts between miners and mine
owners, Haywood often traveled secretly through embattled mining
camps to avoid arrest.
At the turn of the twentieth century Haywood and the Western
Federation of Miners campaigned for eight hour working days for
underground miners. Most mining camps required underground
workers to log ten hours on the job each day, not counting
transportation time up and down the mine shafts, and to work
thirteen out of fourteen days. Because of the WFM efforts, Utah
became the first state in the nation to enact an eight hour work day
for miners.
By 1902 Haywood joined with Charles Moyer to form the
leadership of the Western Federation of Miners. It was an uneasy
partnership from the outset. Moyer was cautious by nature, and
generally believed in negotiation rather than conflict. Haywood
urged strikes and confrontation as the most practical path to forcing
company officials to treat workers fairly. The emergence of Moyer
and Haywood coincided with violent clashes in the mine fields of
the West. Dozens died in showdowns between striking miners and
company owners in Colorado, culminating the bombing of a train
carrying non-union miners near Independence in 1904. Thirteen
people died in the attack, and company officials were quick to tie
the bombing to the fiery rhetoric of Big Bill Haywood. No charges
were ever filed.
Haywood skyrocketed to national notoriety in 1906. The publicity
would cement his infamy in the eyes of some, his celebrity in the
eyes of others.
Shortly after Christmas in 1905, former Idaho Governor Frank
Steunenberg was returning to his home in Caldwell after a day in
his nearby office. As he opened his garden gate a bomb exploded,
shattering the forty-four year old Steunenberg's body. He died
within hours.
Local police quickly arrested a suspicious figure staying in a
Caldwell hotel. He eventually was identified as Harry Orchard.
Under grueling questioning by law enforcement and Pinkerton
private detectives, Orchard confessed to being an assassin hired by
the Western Federation of Miners. He identified dozens of victims,
including the non-union miners killed in the Independence,
Colorado train bombing of 1904. Orchard claimed the murder of
Frank Steunenberg had been ordered by WFM President Charles
Moyer, former board member George Pettibone, and union
Secretary-Treasurer Bill Haywood.
Pinkerton detectives executed a secret raid and arrested Moyer,
Pettibone and Haywood in Denver, Colorado. Foregoing any
attempts at formally extraditing the men, the Pinkertons in effect
kidnaped the suspects and hurried them on to a private train that
raced through the night, delivering them to Boise for trial. On their
arrival, the chief Pinkerton detective announced the men "would
never leave Idaho alive."
Haywood appealed his arrest, claiming it was nothing short of
kidnaping. As the case wound its way through the court system, he
busied himself in the Idaho Penitentiary by taking a correspondence
course in criminal law and running for Governor of Colorado on
the Socialist ticket. When a decision was finally handed down, the
United States Supreme Court decried the abduction of the suspects
but ruled that the arrests should stand. In Idaho, prosecutors
decided to try the defendants individually, with Big Bill Haywood
as the first test case. Haywood went to trial in Boise in the summer
of 1907 on a charge of conspiring to murder Frank Steunenberg.
Prosecutors said their only goal was the death penalty.
From the outset the court drama was billed "the trial of the
century." Dozens of reporters packed the tiny courtroom on a daily
basis. Much of the attraction was focused on the attorneys in the
case. Wiiliam Borah, recently confirmed to sit as a United States
Senator from Idaho and a close personal friend of Frank
Steunenberg, led the prosecution team. Clarence Darrow, perhaps
the nation's best known defense attorney, agreed to defend
Haywood. Darrow's fee was paid by hundreds of small donations
from union members around the nation.
Despite weeks of testimony, the trial turned on the confession of
Harry Orchard. On the stand Orchard recounted in detail his
arrangement with the Western Federation of Miners, and repeatedly
identified Haywood as the force behind the violence. Under crossexamination, Darrow emphasized Orchard's criminal history, the
absence of any evidence to back-up his story, and Orchard's
negotiations with Pinkerton detectives to spare Orchard from
execution.
Darrow's defense turned on depicting Haywood as the victim of a
wide-ranging conspiracy concocted by mine owners who wanted to
silence Haywood's radical voice in support of miners. On the stand,
Haywood firmly denied Orchard's story, asserted his innocence,
and recounted stories of how his union activities had been targeted
by mine owners and the government.
After painfully long closing arguments that stretched the endurance
of jurors, judge and audience alike in the blazing summer heat, the
case went to the jury on the afternoon of July 28, 1907. By
midnight there were rumors that the jury had voted 11-to-1 to
convict Haywood, and that the last holdout would soon change
sides. The Idaho Statesman prepared a headline announcing
Haywood's conviction.
The next morning the jury filed back into the courtroom. The
foreman passed the verdict to court clerk Otto Peterson, who read
the note aloud. "We, the jury in the above entitled case, find the
defendant William D. Haywood. . .not guilty."
Despite complaints that the trial had been rigged, either through
bribes or death threats from the Western Federation of Miners, Bill
Haywood walked out of the Boise courtroom a free man.
But the long months of the trial had taken a toll on the leadership of
the WFM. Haywood and Moyer argued repeatedly during their
months in the Idaho penitentiary. Haywood was becoming more
militant in his approach to labor conflicts, and Moyer was
convinced that compromise and negotiation were the most effective
tools for workers to use in dealing with the system. Haywood's
demands for actions clashed head-on with Moyer's demands for
patience, and in 1908 Haywood left the Western Federation of
Miners.
Looking for a new, aggressive organization Haywood threw his
energies behind the Industrial Workers of the World. Vowing in its
preamble that the working class had nothing in common with
capitalists, the IWW represented the most radical labor organization
of its day. The group sought to organize the most recent immigrants
and the most unskilled workers into the IWW to give them a voice
in the workplace. Nicknamed "wobblies," the group also advocated
sabotage or "direct action" against employers who refused to
recognize the IWW unionizing efforts. By 1915 Big Bill Haywood
was head of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Haywood was at the center of a string of dramatic labor conflicts
that shook the nation in the years leading to America's entry into
World War One. He was an atheist, and his blunt and caustic public
comments on Christianity and the Bible made him a target of
clerics throughout the nation. His speeches in support of IWW
songwriter Joe Hill claimed vast conspiracies of government and
industry to destroy the rights of workers, but did nothing to stop the
execution of Hill for murder in Utah in 1915. Haywood encouraged
numerous strikes throughout the nation, and forged an image of the
IWW as a group that would use any means at its disposal to change
a system it despised. At its peak, the group had more than three
million members.
Haywood was an outspoken critic of America's entry into World
War One, claiming it was an invention of capitalists to make
business rich, and that young men on all sides would be sacrificed
to powerful elites. He urged workers to resist joining the army and
to slow down their work in defense industries. In 1918 Haywood
was convicted of violating federal espionage and sedition laws
when he called for a strike during wartime. He briefly went to a
federal prison, but was released on bail as his case was appealed.
He seized the opportunity to flee the country, and made his way to
join the bolshevik revolution in Russia.
While journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook The World) is
often recognized as an American playing a role in the revolution
that resulted in the Soviet Union, Big Bill Haywood arguably had a
more significant presence among the leaders of the new
government. Cited as a "trusted advisor," Haywood was often used
by the bolshevik government as a spokesperson for the
advancements in worker opportunity claimed by Marxist theorists
like Vladimir Lenin.
Plagued by ill health, Haywood quickly faded from prominence in
Moscow. Several historians have claimed that Haywood ultimately
rejected the "worker's paradise" of the Soviet Union, viewing it as
an abusive police state that provided few true benefits for the
peasants. He died in 1928. Half of his ashes were ceremoniously
buried in a wall of honor at the Kremlin, next to the remains of
John Reed. The remainder were quietly returned to the United
States and buried in Chicago, near a monument to American
workers.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:
"The Rebel Girl"
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn may have died in 1964, but her life is ever vivid and current. A biography, "Iron
in Her Soul" by Helen C. Camp was recently published and requests for permission to quote her in
books and essays still come in weekly to the Communist Party.
As early as age 5, Flynn already had the "indelible impression" of working class life and poverty where
they lived in Manchester, N.H., "where the great mills stretched like prisons along the bank of the
Merrimac River."
Her family moved to the Bronx, N.Y. at the turn of the century. She loved the city and the school,
especially the upper grades where she studied the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which, she said, "I
have been defending ever since."
Her family was an active socialist family. She vividly remembered the Sunday night gatherings at the
Harlem Socialist Club at 250 W. 125th Street. It was here that Flynn, aged 15, made her first public
speech. The topic was "Women Under Socialism."
She frequently went to Union Square with her father, an organizer for the newly-formed Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW). She would speak there, attracting the attention of the press. The author
Theodore Dreiser, then working as a journalist, wrote of her as "an East Side Joan of Arc."
She joined the IWW in 1906 at 16. Of the IWW Flynn wrote, "It blazed a trail like a great comet across
the American labor scene from 1905 to 1920." She was assigned to IWW Local 179. Her first
experience as an IWW speaker took place in Brandywine Park in Schenectady, N.Y. at a meeting
protesting the arrest of "Wobblies" Bill Haywood and George Pettibone.
She attended her first IWW Convention as a delegate from Local 177 in Chicago in 1907 while still in
high school and met Lucy Parson, widow of Albert Parson, who had been executed 20 years before, a
martyr of the struggle for the eight-hour day.
At the convention she also met J. A. Jones, organizer of the Minnesota IWW, who invited her to come
on a speaking tour to the Mesabi Iron Range north of Duluth where he was an organizer for the Western
Federation of Miners. She went on to Butte, and later to Kalispell, Montana where the IWW was
leading a lumber strike.
Gurley's first real participation in the IWW free speech fight and second arrest occurred in Missoula,
Mont. in the fall of 1908. The city council had passed an ordinance making street speech unlawful. The
IWW decided to defy this ordinance as unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment. Speaker
after speaker was arrested, including Flynn. She participated in 26 such battles between 1909 and 1916
and emerged as an eloquent speaker.
1912 brought the Lawrence, Mass. mill strike: 14,000 people went out and the mills remained empty
for three months. The strikers spoke in 25 different languages and 45 different dialects. With the arrest
of the original leaders, Gurley and Haywood were brought into the strike. They addressed 10 meetings
a day.
Police brutality and hunger forced the strike committee to send their children out of town to
sympathizers who volunteered to take them for the duration of the strike. Gurley was in charge of the
evacuation of the children. On Feb. 22 the police arrested the children at the train station. The local
authorities, infuriated by the favorable publicity of the strikers, decided no more children would leave
town.
On Feb. 24 Flynn tried to put another 40 children on a train for Philadelphia. The police, with clubs
drawn, attacked the group, arresting 15 parents and children, and sent 10 terrified children to the
Lawrence Poor Farm. The newspapers headlined the situation and the publicity forced Congress to
investigate the conditions in the shops. The strike was won by mid-March with wage increases from 5
to 25 percent, with the largest increases going to the lowest paid workers.
On March 3, 1913, 25,000 silk workers in Paterson, N.J. struck. Over 1,000 strikers were arrested. It
became a bloody confrontation between the strikers and the hired thugs, police and judges.
Picketing and outdoor meetings were forbidden. Picketers arrested were automatically sentenced to
three months in jail. The nearest meeting place was Haledon, a neighboring suburb whose mayor was a
socialist. There Flynn spoke to the mass meetings.
On June 7, the strikers gave a propaganda pageant for the Paterson strike, in Madison Square Garden in
New York City, orchestrated by John Reed. It was a theatrical success, but financially a failure because
of the expense of the Garden, transportation and publicity. The treasury was zero and the strikers starved into submission - slowly drifted back into the shops. By Aug. 1 the strike was officially ended.
The IWW suffered a setback in Paterson and never completely recovered.
In the spring of 1915, Hill was visited in his cell by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn came away from the
meeting as Hill's new champion: "He is tall, good looking, but naturally thin after sixteen months in a
dark and narrow cell with another row of cells between him and daylight. Joe Hill had nothing to say
about his case or himself. He only said, 'I'm not afraid of death, but I'd like to be in the fight a little
longer.' Can we afford to give up our Joe Hill without a struggle?"
Hill immediately composed a song in honor of Flynn. . .a sentimental
tune that championed the women of the I.W.W. He titled it "The Rebel
Girl."
At the end of World War I the government organized an all- out attack
against workers, a reaction to the Russian Revolution and a near uprising
of workers in the United States. Nearly a million workers were on strike,
including the Seattle General Strike, an industry-wide strike of 365,000
steel workers led by William Z. Foster, 400,000 miners out, 200,000
railroad workers and the Boston Police Strike. During this time the
Communist Party was formed.
To halt this upsurge the government launched an all-out attack on labor.
The agents of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his
assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, invaded homes and meetings, arresting over
10,000 men and women in a single night. Hundreds were deported,
thousands imprisoned for opposition to the war.
Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, were arrested and accused of murder.
Flynn was one of the first to investigate the case, which became the most famous labor defense fight in
history. For the next seven years, Communists helped lead the fightback against the case, which
sparked protests worldwide. Despite the outcry, however, the two men were executed.
The International Labor Defense was organized in June of 1925 and Flynn became chairperson in 1926.
It existed for over 15 years and was succeeded by the Civil Rights Congress, in which Flynn was also
active.
Flynn joined the Communist Party in 1936. In 1937 she made her first speech as a Communist at
Madison Square Garden. She wrote a biweekly column for the Daily Worker and served as chair of the
women's commission for 10 years.
In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress at large in New York and received 50,000 votes. Her program was
geared especially toward women, millions of whom had been drawn into factories and offices during
the war. She believed that African American women were the most discriminated against, superexploited workers in spite of the Fair Employment Protection Act. The Ford Motor Co. would not even
accept applications from African American women until militant demonstrations forced an end to this
discrimination.
In July 1948 12 leaders of the CPUSA were arrested under the infamous anti-Communist witchhunt,
falsely accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn
launched a mass defense campaign for the release of the 11. In June 1951 at the height of the McCarthy
period, Flynn was arrested in the second wave of arrests. Between the time of her sentencing and her
actual imprisonment, Flynn ran for Congress from the Bronx on the Communist Party ticket under the
slogan of "Vote No! to McCarthyism." For Peace and Jobs! Amnesty for all." She received 4,000 votes.
On Jan. 24, 1951, Flynn, Claudia Jones and Betty Gannett were incarcerated in Alderson Women's
Federal Prison in West Virginia.
On her return from prison Flynn ran for city council with the slogan of "Clean Jim Crow out of New
York" and for full equality for women. In 1961 Flynn was elected CPUSA national chairperson, a post
she held until her death.
In January 1962 the State Department revoked the passports of five well-known Communists, including
Flynn who had just returned from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's 22nd Congress. She
protested that "to set up classes of citizens who can't leave the country due to political beliefs is
unconstitutional and a violation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948.
When the test case reached the court in 1964 the justices agreed with her. They ruled Section 6 of the
McCarran Act unconstitutional.
In August 1964, after the McCarran Act was struck down, Flynn went to the USSR representing the
CPUSA at an international Party Congress. She hoped to write her autobiography there. Instead she
was hospitalized for a stomach disorder and died on Sept. 5.
She was honored with a state funeral in Red Square. Her body lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the
Soviet Trade Unions. For eight hours a column of mourners, six abreast, filed past. Wreaths from
workers' organizations and trade unions from the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
Communist parties around the globe adorned the casket.
The New York Times gave this story front page coverage, quoting a May Day speech in which Flynn
said "I believe in a socialist America. What a May Day that will be to celebrate. Hail to it."
In accordance with her wishes, Flynn's remains were flown to the U.S. for burial in Chicago's
Waldheim Cemetery, near the grave of Eugene Dennis, Big Bill Haywood and the Haymarket martyrs.
(Courtesy of People's Weekly World)
Mother Jones:
"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!"
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones lost her husband and four children to yellow fever, then all of her personal
belongings in the great Chicago fire.
She then adopted American working people as her family. Mother Jones fought for better working
conditions for miners, tradesmen and women, and to reform child labor laws.
A dramatic speaker who commanded much attention, she helped in the 1877 Pittsburgh railway strike;
during the 1880s she organized and ran educational meetings. She was an organizer for the United
Mine Workers, helped found the Social Democratic Party in 1898, was a lecturer for the Socialist Party
of America, and aided in the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World.
During a strike in West Virginia, she was arrested during a protest, convicted and sentenced to 20 years
in prison. Her ordeal was not without its positive outcome--the U.S. Senate ordered a committee to
investigate conditions in the West Virginia coalfields, and she was set free by the governor.
In her eighties, Mother Jones brought a packed house in Trinidad, Colorado's West theatre to its feet.
"Rise up and strike. . .strike until the last one of you drop into your graves. We are going to stand
together and never surrender. Boys, always remember you ain't got a damn thing if you ain't got a
union!"
Mother Jones lived 100 years. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery at Mount Olive, Illinois.
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers emigrated in 1863 to New York, where he followed his father's trade of cigar making
and became a naturalized citizen in 1872. As a labour leader, Gompers gained a worldwide reputation
for conservatism. In a period when the U.S. was bitterly hostile to labour organizations, he evolved the
principles of "voluntarism," which stressed that unions should exert coercion by economic actions, i.e.,
strikes and boycotts.
In 1886 Gompers led the national organization of cigar makers from the Knights of Labor to form the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), of which he was president from 1886 to 1924 (except for one
year, 1895). He distrusted the influence of intellectual reformers, fearing any activity which would
divert labour's energy from economic goals. To make unionism respectable as a bulwark against
radicalism and irresponsible strikes, he encouraged binding, written trade agreements and advocated
the primacy of national organizations over both local unions and international affiliations.
Gompers kept the AFL politically neutral until pressed by employer tactics, including an open-shop
drive, and by federal court injunctions which greatly weakened labour's economic weapons, the strike,
picket line, and boycott. Even in the lowest paying jobs, the influx of immigrants to the American
workforce was deeply resented. The resentment extended to self-described champions of the working
man, such as Samuel Gompers, the leader of the American Federation of Labor.
"Both the intelligence and the prosperity of our working people are endangered by the present
immigration. Cheap labor... ignorant labor...takes our jobs and cuts our wages."
Samuel Gompers was one of many who made a plea on behalf of Joe Hill. On the evening of
November 16th, Wilson's special political assistant, Joseph Tumulty received a telegram from
Gompers.
"May I not prevail upon you to exercise your great influence to at least help in saving the life of Joseph
Hillstrom, when there is so much doubt concerning his case?"
While far from the political power it would one day achieve, the AFL represented organized workers
spanning America. The AFL was too large of a voting block to ignore. On the morning of November
17th, Tumulty dashed off a return telegram to Gompers.
"The president has received your telegram, and has this morning telegraphed the governor of Utah
urging the justice and advisability of a thorough reconsideration of the case."
Gompers received word even before the telegram was sent to Governor Spry.