Okay, I want you to picture a man. A giant of
a man. We're talking, what, over six feet tall,
broad -shouldered, and just built like he was
carved out of granite. He walks into a room and
the whole energy shifts. But the first thing
you notice isn't his size. It's his face. Specifically,
his right eye. Or, um... What's left of it. Exactly.
It's all clouded over, totally blind. And when
he takes a photo, he always turns his head. You
always get the left profile. He refused to wear
a glass eye, you know. Right. It wasn't about
hiding the scar. I was about controlling the
image. He looks like a pirate king who just happened
to wander into a union hall. That is such a good
way to put it. And for a huge part of the early
20th century, that face, the face of Big Bill
Haywood was, I mean, it was the face of the American
nightmare for the establishment. Absolutely.
He was either the Lincoln of labor or the most
dangerous man in America, depending on who you're
talking to. And today we are diving deep into
exactly why. We're going to unpack the life of
the man who founded the industrial workers of
the world, the Wobblies. Yeah. And our stack
of sources for this is pretty incredible. We
have his own autobiography. We have court transcripts
from these high profile murder trials, espionage
records from the government. It's a wild, wild
ride. I mean, we're going from the bottom of
a mine shaft in Nevada to a jail cell in Idaho.
And somehow we end up with his ashes in the Kremlin
wall in Moscow. It's an unbelievable trajectory.
So let's start at the beginning. How does a kid
from Salt Lake City even become a revolutionary?
Well, you know, usually when we talk about these
historical figures, we talk about their formal
education. But for Bill Haywood, his education
was, it was pain. The whole school of hard knocks
thing is such a cliche. But for him, it was completely
literal. He was born in 1869. His dad dies when
he's just three years old. And then comes the
accident with his eye. Right. He was nine. Just
a kid whittling with a knife and it slipped.
It punctured his right eye. And that was it.
Blinded for the rest of his life. But what happens
next is what really just blew my mind in the
research. He's a kid, he has this severe injury,
and his family sends him off to work. And we're
not talking about a paper route. No. His uncle
arranges for him to work on a farm. But the sources
are really clear on this. It was not a job. He
was bound out. It was... for all intents and
purposes, indentured servitude. Indentured servitude
in America in the 1870s. It was archaic even
then. He was trapped. He hated it. And that experience,
you know, of being physically owned by an employer
that never, ever left him. So he eventually gets
out of that situation. But by 15, he's down in
the mines. And if you think a farm is bad, a
19th century mine is. it's a horror movie yeah
it was brutal i mean zero safety regulations
ventilation was a joke men were being crushed
blown up or they'd die slowly from lung disease
haywood himself had his hands crushed he had
scars all over his body which brings me to my
absolute favorite quote of his later in life
people would try to debate him on like political
theory. They'd ask if he was a Marxist, if he'd
read all the academic texts. And Heywood would
just hold up his scarred hands and point to his
blind eye and say, I've never read Marx's Capital,
but I have the Marx of Capital all over me. It's
just such a mic drop moment, isn't it? It is.
But it's also the key to understanding him. He
wasn't a philosopher. He was a witness. His radicalization
came from the gut, not from some book. And he's
looking at the labor movement at the time, and
he's thinking, we are doing this all wrong. Okay,
let's get into that. moment yeah because this
is really the intellectual core of the whole
story at the time the big player is the AFL the
American Federation of Labor right and the AFL
was built on something called craft unionism
craft unionism okay bring that down for us it
means you organize by skill so On a railroad,
you'd have one union just for the engineers,
a totally separate union for the firemen, another
one for the brakemen. So they're all chopped
up into these little silos. Exactly. And they
all have different contracts, different leaders,
different goals. And Haywood saw this as a fatal
flaw. He called it being scabby at both ends.
Which is a pretty disgusting phrase, by the way.
It's so visceral. But here's what he meant. He
saw this happen during the Cripple Creek strike.
You had miners on strike, right? Fighting for
their lives. But then a train comes in to haul
away the ore. The ore that was dug by strike
breakers. Yes. Scab ore. And who's driving the
train? Union men. Members of the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Firemen. Wait. So union members
were actively helping to break another union
strike. Because their specific union had a contract
to haul the freight, they basically said, look,
sorry, we support you in spirit, but our contract
says we have to drive this train. Wow. Haywood
looked at that and just said, the owners are
playing chess and we are playing checkers. Because
the owners are united and the workers are divided
against themselves by their own job titles. Precisely.
So Haywood proposes this radical shift, industrial
unionism. One big union. One big union. It doesn't
matter if you're a skilled engineer or the guy
who sweeps the floor. If you work in the railroad
industry, you are in the same union. If the miners
strike, the train stops, period. He wanted to
turn the entire supply chain into a single weapon.
He wasn't trying to get a five cent raise. He
was trying to jam the gears of the entire capitalist
economy. And that is why the government was so
terrified of him. So. He takes this idea to Chicago
in 1905. Brands Hall. And this scene feels like
the start of a movie. The room is packed with
anarchists, socialists, every kind of rebel imaginable.
He called it the Continental Congress of the
Working Class. He gets up to the podium, grabs
a loose piece of board off the stage, and just...
bangs it on the table like a gavel to get everyone's
attention. And he says, fellow workers. That
was the greeting, not ladies and gentlemen. It
was fellow workers, and the IWW is born. But
there's something else about the IWW we have
to talk about. Because for 1905, their membership
policy was shocking. Oh, right, their inclusivity.
Most unions at the time, the AFL included, were
very exclusive. They didn't want unskilled workers.
They often excluded immigrants. And many of them,
I mean, explicitly excluded black workers. But
Haywood said, open the doors to everyone. He
didn't just say it. He risked his life for it.
There's this incredible story in the notes about
the Brotherhood of Timber Workers down in Louisiana
around 1912. Louisiana in 1912. I mean, that
is the deep, deep south. Jim Crow is the absolute
law of the land. Strictly. It was illegal for
black and white people to meet together in the
same hall. But the timber industry was mixed.
You had black and white loggers working side
by side. So Haywood goes down there for their
convention. And the organizers ask him, Bill,
what do we do? The law says we can't meet together.
And what does Bill say? He says, you work in
the same mills together. You chop down the same
trees. Why not be sensible about this and call
the Negroes into the convention? Be sensible.
He makes it sound so logical. But he is telling
them to break the law. A very dangerous law to
break. He is. He says if it is against the law,
this is one time when the law should be broken.
And they did it. They held an interracial union
convention in 1912, Louisiana. That is one big
union in action. That's an incredible moment.
But of course, when you go around breaking segregation
laws and threatening to shut down the entire
U .S. economy, you make some powerful enemies.
Which brings us to the trial of the century.
The Steinenberg murder. Yeah, this is a true
crime saga wrapped inside a political drama.
Okay, set the scene for us. It's 1905, Idaho.
Frank Steinenberg is the former governor of Idaho,
a man who had viciously crushed the miners' unions
during his time in office. One evening, he's
walking into his home, he opens his garden gate.
And the gate is rigged. dynamite a huge bomb
explodes steinenberg is killed instantly it's
a political assassination and the authorities
immediately look at the union of course they
bring in the pinkertons specifically a famous
detective named james mcparland and mcparland
finds this guy a drifter named harry orchard
harry orchard he seems like a real piece of work
oh he's a career criminal so mcparland arrests
him throws him in solitary threatens him with
hanging and then he takes him to lunch A sumptuous
lunch, according to the records. It's the classic
good cop routine. He gives Orchard a fancy meal
and cigars and says, look, Harry, you're going
to hang. Unless. Unless you were just a pawn.
Unless you were just following orders. And Orchard
starts singing. Like a canary. He confesses to
the bombing, but then he just keeps going. He
confesses to 17 other murders. And he claims
the whole thing was ordered by the Inner Circle
of the Western Federation of Miners, Charles
Moyer, George Pettibone, and... Bill Haywood.
But there's a problem, right? Haywood isn't even
in Idaho. He's in Denver, Colorado. Correct.
And this is where things get legally, let's call
it creative. You mean illegal. Well, effectively,
yeah. You can only extradite a fugitive, someone
who commits a crime in a state and then flees.
Haywood wasn't in Idaho, so technically he couldn't
have fled. So they can't legally arrest him and
bring him back? Not through any normal channels.
So the Idaho authorities and the Pinkertons cook
up a plan. They get a secret warrant. They go
to Denver, arrest Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone
in the middle of the night. They hold them incommunicado
at the Oxford Hotel jail, deny them a phone call,
and then shove them onto a special train bound
for Idaho. A rendition train, basically. That's
what it was. And the train had specific instructions.
Do not stop at any major stations. They were
terrified that if they stopped in a union town,
a mob would storm the train and free them. So
they basically wake up in an Idaho jail facing
the death penalty. It's a kidnapping. It was.
The Supreme Court actually had to rule on this
later. And the prosecution's argument was just
wild. They argued that because the conspiracy
allegedly touched Idaho, the men were constructively
present at the crime scene. Constructively present.
That is some top tier legal gymnastics. It's
absurd. But it worked. Haywood is on trial for
his life. But he has an ace up his sleeve. Clarence
Darrell. The greatest defense attorney in American
history. And Darrell looks at the prosecution's
case and he sees the one single weak link. Harry
Orchard. The man who confessed to 18 murders.
Exactly. The entire case rested on the jury believing
this one guy. So Darrow doesn't just cross -examine
him. He dissects him piece by piece on the stand
for days. What does he do? He gets Orchard to
admit he was paid by the Pinkertons. He gets
him to admit he hated Haywood personally. He
exposes every lie, every single contradiction
in his story. He turns their star witness into
a monster. That's exactly it. By the end, Darrow
just looks at the jury and basically says, to
kill Bill Haywood, you have to trust Harry Orchard,
a man who admits he is a mass murderer, a liar,
and a paid snitch. And the jury didn't buy it.
Acquitted, not guilty. Haywood walks out of that
courtroom a free man and a national celebrity.
He is now officially the Lincoln of labor. But
he doesn't retire. He doesn't go on a speaking
tour and settle down. He goes right back into
the fight. Which brings us to 1912, Lawrence,
Massachusetts. The Bread and Roses strike. This
is arguably the IWW's greatest victory. You have
20 ,000 textile workers, mostly immigrant women
and children, striking against wage cuts. The
city is under martial law. The police are beating
people in the streets. And Haywood shows up to
take command. But he realizes they're losing
the PR war. They're being painted as violent
anarchists. He needs to flip the script. So he
borrows a tactic from Europe, the children's
exodus. This part of the story just... It really
gets me. It's incredibly moving. The strikers
were starving. They couldn't feed their own kids.
So Haywood arranges for the children to be sent
away to sympathetic families in New York City
and Vermont. Can you just picture that scene?
February 10th, 1912. Hundreds of kids at the
train station saying goodbye to their parents.
No idea when they'll see them again. But when
they got to New York, it was a parade. Thousands
of supporters greeted them. They were given new
clothes, hot food, medical checkups, and the
press took pictures. Pictures of these skinny,
malnourished children who'd been working in the
mills. Exactly. It shamed the mill owners. It
showed the entire country what kind of poverty
these people were fighting. And the authorities
back in Lawrence, they panicked. They knew they
were losing the narrative. So they made a fatal
mistake. A horrific one. On February 24, another
group of children is at the station, ready to
leave. And the police surround them. And they
attack. They attack the children. They clubbed
the mothers. They dragged children by their hair
and threw them into military trucks to stop them
from getting on the train. That is just evil.
It was PR suicide. The next day, headlines across
the country are screaming about police brutality
against women and children. The New York World
called the mill owners mad. President Taft himself
ordered an investigation. The public pressure
was so intense the owners just folded. They met
every single demand. The total victory. Yeah.
So Heywood is on top of the world. He's winning
in court. He's winning on the streets. But history
always has a way of turning, doesn't it? And
the turn here is World War I. The war changed
everything. The U .S. government needed unity.
It needed production. It had zero patience for
a union that wanted to overthrow capitalism and
was actively opposing the war. And the IWW was
staunchly anti -war. They saw it as a rich man's
war being fought by poor men. So the government
passes the Espionage Act of 1917, and they use
it to just drop the hammer on the Wobblies. We're
talking raids. Massive coordinated raids. September
1917, federal agents hit 48 IWW halls on the
same day. They seize tons of documents, and they
arrest the entire leadership. Heywood and 100
others are put on trial together. 100 defendants
in one courtroom. That's not a trial. That's
a circus. It was a show trial from start to finish.
The judge was Kennesaw Mountain Landers, famous
for being tough. The jury was out for less than
an hour for over 100 defendants. Guilty across
the board. And Heywood gets 20 years. 20 years.
He's almost 50. He's diabetic. It's a death sentence.
So he appeals. He gets out on bail. And this
is where the story takes a really dark turn.
The captain of the ship. The man who told everyone
to stand firm. He runs. He runs. In 1921, while
the appeal is still pending, Haywood gets a fake
passport, boards a ship, and flees to Soviet
Russia. And this wasn't just a personal choice.
This really hurt people, didn't it? It devastated
the movement. You have to understand, the bail
money, $15 ,000, which is a fortune back then,
was put up by his supporters. Poor workers who
scraped that money together. When he fled, the
government kept it all. His own lawyer called
it harakiri. It was. It was reputation suicide.
He validated everything the government had ever
said about him being un -American and a traitor.
He saved his own skin, but he left his fellow
workers holding the bag. So he gets to Moscow.
Soviet Union. This is the worker's paradise he'd
been dreaming about his whole life. And, you
know, initially he's treated like a hero. He
advises Lenin. He's in the inner circle. But
the reality sets in very, very fast. Ugly. He's
totally isolated. He doesn't speak Russian. He's
watching the Soviet experiment turn into a brutal
dictatorship, which is the opposite of his belief
in industrial freedom. He starts drinking heavily.
There's a detail in the notes about his marriage
there that is just, it's heartbreaking. Yeah.
He married a Russian woman. But she didn't speak
any English, and he never learned Russian. So
they just communicated in sign language. Gestures.
Imagine that. The great orator. The man whose
voice could command a rally of 20 ,000 people.
And he ends his life in a cold Moscow apartment,
unable to speak a full sentence to his own wife.
That is just a cruel, cruel irony. It is. He
died in 1928 from a stroke brought on by the
alcoholism and diabetes. He was only 59. But
even in death, he couldn't just choose one side.
No. His ashes were divided. Half were buried
in the Kremlin Wall, which is the highest honor
in the Soviet Union. He's right there next to
John Reed. But the other half... The other half
was shipped all the way back to Chicago. To be
buried near the Haymarket Martyrs Monument? Right
back to where his own radicalization began, a
foot in both worlds right to the very end. So
how do we sum up a life like Bill Haywood's?
He was a hero to the downtrodden, a brilliant
tactician, but he ended his life as a fugitive
who... some would say, betrayed his own followers.
He was a man of absolutes. He didn't believe
in compromise. And that made him an incredible
organizer because he could inspire people to
do the impossible. But it also made him a tragic
figure because he couldn't navigate the gray
areas of politics or, you know, just survival.
I just keep coming back to that core idea of
one big union. The idea that because we're all
connected in the economy, we should be connected
in our resistance. An injury to one is an injury
to all. Exactly. And here's the thought I want
to leave everyone with. Today we live in the
era of the gig economy. You have Uber drivers,
freelance coders, Amazon warehouse workers, all
isolated, all on different contracts, often working
completely alone. It's the ultimate fractured
workforce. Right. In a world that is more scabby
at both ends than ever before, is Haywood's dream
of one big union just a relic of the past? Or
is it actually the only idea that could possibly
work in today's globalized economy? That is the
question, isn't it? Could you even organize a
one big union for the Internet age? Something
to think about. Thanks for diving deep with us.
We'll see you next time.