In a small room of the Kremlin Hospital, Moscow, Big Bill Haywood died last week.
William Dudley Haywood had been born 59 years ago in another small gloomy room, the kitchen of a mining cottage in Salt Lake City where his father worked. When he was nine, Bill Haywood was sent to work digging coal; this he disliked, so a few years later he was bound out to a farmer. Bill Haywood ran away from the farm, did some prospecting, became a Socialist. In 1899, when the Coeur d' Alene, Idaho, striking began, he was chairman of the executive committee of the Western Federation of Miners. Seven years later he was the defendant in a trial that made his name famous in the U. S. as it increased the fame of Clarence S. Darrow, who defended him, and that of a local Idaho politician, William Edgar Borah who prosecuted him.
The facts briefly were these. In the bloody guerilla battling that followed the Coeur d'Alene trouble, Governor Steunenberg of Idaho had called out the state militia, who, using unquestionably brutal means had succeeded in beating down the equally murderous members of the Federation. Steunenberg was the target for the miners' rage; in 1906 he was the target for a bullet that killed him. Haywood with two others was held for the murder; the news of the trial filled the press and three names filled the news. Most of all, Haywood, the thick-lipped, scarfaced, foul-mouthed friend to every man in the world who had to work like a slave; Darrow, the gentle, sorrowful, immensely kind, and immensely clever Chicago lawyer; and Borah, lofty, muscular, and furious, who hated Haywood not because he hated radicals, but because he thought Haywood had killed or helped to kill a brave and faithful man.
The history of that trial in the newspapers of 1906 and 1907 is worth reading. The prosecution addressed 150,000 words to the jury, the defense used 250,000. Everyone rather expected Borah to win. He might have won in the end had not a man who later admitted killing Governor Steunenberg made some absurd charges against Haywood which discredited his earlier incriminations. Haywood was freed after 18 months in jail, a famous man and to all dissatisfied workmen a hero.
The Idaho lawyer who might have dropped back into the dusty puddle of state politics after his glorious defeat went on to Washington, to Congress, to the Senate, to a great portion of respect and honor. Clarence Darrow every year more saddened by wrongs as untouchable as stars, could do not better than go on defending queer men, among them, two pale, sadistic murderers and a country school teacher. Big Bill Haywood took advantage of his fame. He organized the I. W. W. "We are the roughneck gang," he said. When the War came he refused to fight.