A Working-Class Legend

BIG BILL HAYWOOD AND THE WESTERN FEDERATION OF MINERS (WFM) deserve better. Tony Lukas' massive new book on Haywood's 1907 murder-conspiracy trial could have made their story accessible to readers unlikely ever to stumble across the defendant's own memoirs, Melvyn Dubofsky's 1987 biography of him, or WFM histories written by several academics. Instead, Lukas' account of the legal, political, and media circus surrounding the case provides great insight into the life and times of almost everyone else involved -- except the miners. For example, we get lots of fascinating detail about the murder victim, former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg; Clarence Darrow and his courtroom maneuvering to free Haywood; Robert McParland, the notorious Pinkerton man who betrayed the Molly McGuires and later tried his best to frame the WFM as well; Teddy Roosevelt and the black "rough riders" who fought with him in the Spanish-American War before the latter were dispatched at Steunenberg's request for strike-breaking duty in Coeur d'Alene; Gene Debs and the early 20th century labor and socialist press which made Haywood's case a national cause celèbre. We even learn what it was like to belong to a smalltown Socialist Party branch near the peak of socialism's influence in this country.

But the main actors in the labor struggles that led to this courtroom drama remain curiously indistinct -- an anonymous mob of workers waging armed warfare against their brutal employers. As Lukas notes, the underground lead and silver mines "beneath the Rockies sparkling spine" represented "the very worst of the industrial system." By the early 1890s, the Coeur d'Alene district had "a wage-earning proletariat at the mercy of absentee mine owners and their managers, helpless in gut-wrenching cycles of boom and bust, never sinking roots in permanent community, destined to drift from one ramshackle mining camp to another." When they tried to organize to improve these conditions, the miners often found themselves fired and blacklisted -- after being fingered by Pinkerton spies who infiltrated their ranks. Big trouble first came to northern Idaho in 1892 when a lockout, wage cuts, scab herding, and other provocations triggered a violent response. Miners commandeered trains, fired on scabs, and threatened to blow up nonunion equipment. The then-Republican governor of the state relied on both National Guardsmen and federal troops to end this "state of insurrection and rebellion." They rounded up more than 600 strikers and held them in "bullpens" for more than two months without any hearings or formal charges. The ringleaders, including Haywood's later co-defendant George Pettibone, were convicted of contempt of court and criminal conspiracy.

The Idaho miners' defeat in 1892 led them to federate with previously independent local unions throughout the mountain states. Not only did their new organization -- the WFM -- give them more industrial strength, they also joined the great Populist Party upsurge which promised to put government power in the hands of Western farmers and workers. In 1896, working-class voters turned northern Idaho's Shoshone County "into a Populist stronghold by aggressively taking up the cause of the embattled miners and capturing all county offices." In the state's gubernatorial contest that year, Democrats, Populists, and organized labor backed the fusion candidacy of newspaper owner (and former union printer) Frank Steunenberg. While Populist hero William Jennings Bryan was going down to defeat in his presidential race against William McKinley, Steunenberg won in Idaho by the biggest margin in its history. Then, writes Lukas,

With Steunenberg as governor, the Populists and miners union were more determined than ever to wrest economic power from the mine owners as well. After all, the owners victory in 1892 had been achieved precisely by the decisive intervention of their allies in the White House and the state house. Politics had made all the difference. At last, the miners thought, the shoe was on the other foot. With a friend in the governor's office, they now fully expected state government to reinforce, rather than frustrate their demands.

The alliance frayed quickly when the new governor refused to disband two National Guard units drawn from nonunion employees of the Bunker Hill an Sullivan Company, "the region's most determined enemy of union labor" which refused to hire any known members of the WFM. In 1899, the Federation decided to confront Bunker Hill over its anti-unionism and payment of substandard wages.

On April 29, hundreds of armed miners in the area hopped on a Northern Pacific train commandeered for the purpose of taking them to Wardner, Idaho -- Bunker Hill's base of operations. They proceeded to blow up a $250,000 ore concentrator -- one of the world's largest at the time -- plus other company buildings. Under pressure from worried mine owners throughout the Coeur d'Alenes, Steunenberg wired McKinley seeking the intervention of federal troops. One of the regiments sent was carefully picked -- black veterans of the Spanish-American war who "wouldn't bond with the unruly white rioters, mainly Irish, Cornish, Italian, and Scandinavian."

These and other soldiers conducted house-to-house searches at bayonet-point and made mass arrests in every mining community in the area with "a criminal history." Soon, 1,000 men were in bullpens again, just like the ones erected seven years before. Under cover of martial law, Steunenberg's attorney general established a permit system for all miners which denied working papers -- and employment -- to those who belonged to "criminal organizations." Clearly aimed at the WFM, this measure was "a blatant violation of the state's prohibition against yellowdog contracts." Ten men were tried, convicted and sent to San Quentin for hijacking the train; one boxcar rider got 17 years at hard labor on various state charges. Eventually, all the others in the bullpen -- never charged with anything -- were released.

SIX YEARS LATER, FRANK STEUNENBERG -- now out of office and prospering as a local banker -- got his reward for services rendered to the mine owners. On a snowy December night in 1905, he opened the gate to his cozy house in Caldwell, Idaho, triggering a blast of cleverly-rigged dynamite. A strange drifter named Harry Orchard was immediately arrested. Under the tender ministrations of the infamous Pinkerton McParland, he soon confessed to a wide-ranging campaign of mayhem and murder -- all allegedly masterminded by Haywood, then secretary- treasurer of the WFM; its president Charles Moyer; and George Pettibone, a store owner and former leader of the union. In the view of state officials, mine owners, their private detectives, and privately funded prosecutors, this WFM "inner circle" were the real guilty parties in the revenge killing. To keep working-class anarchy and lawlessness in check, they decided to convict and hang all three men as an example to their followers.

Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone were, of course, nowhere near Caldwell when the former governor died. They were not readily extraditable from Denver, where WFM headquarters was located. So, with the help of friendly railroad barons, the Pinkerton Agency arranged to have them kidnapped and shipped them back to Idaho on a special train to face murder and conspiracy charges. (As one Haywood opponent in Colorado put it, "To hell with the Constitution, we aren't going by the constitution.") By 1907, when Haywood became the first of the defendants to stand trial after spending a year in jail, it would have been hard to find a more notorious prisoner anywhere in the country. President Roosevelt personally pronounced him to be "an undesirable citizen." Since the Coeur d'Alenes ordeal, Haywood had been involved in a disastrous WFM clash with Colorado mine owners in 1903 and also helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago a year later. In terms of his own continuing WFM role, by the time of his kidnapping and trial, he was, according to Dubofsky, only a part-time union official but a "full-time agitator and dedicated revolutionary." His legendary speech- making had become ever more radical in tone and content. He was, in short, not the kind of guy that a bunch of sheep ranchers and shopkeepers from Boise would find particularly innocent-looking -- even if he hadn't been buried under a mountain of prejudicial pretrial publicity. Furthermore, the prosecutors in the case included a one- time WFM lawyer and Idaho's best-known Republican orator William Borah, later to be its U.S. Senator.

Fortunately for Haywood, Harry Orchard did poorly as the prosecution's star witness. Darrow's cross-examination exposed him as the thief, murderer, perjurer, and agent provocateur that he was. Then "the Great Defender" delivered a successful closing argument of Castroite length -- eleven hours in all -- which invited the jurors to side with "the toilers in the mines, mills and on the farms of the country" who were praying for an acquittal and against "the corporations, the railroads, the Rockefellers, and the Wall Street bankers" who were beseeching God for the opposite verdict. The appeal succeeded, writes Lukas, because "many of these Idaho farmers had been deeply moved by [Haywood's] determination to fight for 'poor, the weak, and the weary.'"

BIG TROUBLE IS FULL OF COLORFUL CHARACTERS LIKE DARROW and many less well-known ones. My favorite bit-player is James D. Young, the prolabor sheriff of Shoshone County during the "Dynamite Express" ride to the Bunker Hill mine. Elected as a populist and openly sympathetic to the miners, Young stalled state officials for as long as he could when they frantically tried to reach him on the phone to confirm reports from the mine owners that strikers were marching in armed columns with the intention of blowing up scab equipment. Finding himself in the middle of the mob at one point, Young ordered it to disband with the same wink and a nod once used by United Mine Workers' (UMW) local officers when compelled to disperse West Virginia wildcatters under threat of injunctions, fines, contempt citations, and damage suits. The real wielders of state power were, of course, not pleased with his failure to act like the sheriffs of Western lore. As soon as martial law was declared and federal troops moved in, Young and the county's two Populist Commissioners were thrown in jail along with hundreds of miners.

Young reminded me of Joe Perry, the elected sheriff of McCreary County, Kentucky who once confiscated the guns of Storm Security guards during a mid-1970s United Mine Workers strike against Blue Diamond Coal Co. in the isolated town of Stearns. Perry proudly displayed his cache of enemy hardware to a propaganda team from the UMW Journal (of which I was a part), while not far away our members were "picketing" with the aid of pistols (worn cowboy style in hip holsters), plus openly brandished shotguns, hunting rifles, and automatic weapons. The union's sand-bagged positions and nightly fire fights with company guards eventually attracted the attention of Kentucky's governor and State Police. Finally, a company man was killed and the neighbors really started complaining about the risk to public safety from all the flying lead. The massive state cop crackdown that followed swept Perry aside, sent several strikers to jail for long terms, and left the rest of the miners without a contract settlement. And because their defeat was deemed an embarrassment by the national union -- which was partly responsible for the counterproductive violence -- no one ever made a movie about it like "Harlan County, U.S.A."

The broader outlines of Lukas' story have wider contemporary resonance. The carnival atmosphere outside the courtroom where the bosses tried unsuccessfully to lynch Haywood clearly rivaled the scene at more recent show trials like the prosecution of the Chicago 7, Angela Davis, or recently-freed Black Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt. Management's use of force to break the miners' strike -- and a Democratic governor's decision to send troops in to help -- had just as devastating an effect in Arizona in the 1980s as it did in Idaho almost a century ago. Steunenberg's betrayal of his working- class populist supporters in Coeur d'Alene wrote the script for (now-Clinton Cabinet member) Bruce Babbitt's use of the National Guard to crush United Steel Workers of America (USWA) members at Phelps Dodge (a labor tragedy recounted with a novelist's skill in Barbara Kinsolver's Holding the Line.) For anyone involved in left-wing or union politics (or both), there are also some depressingly familiar sections of Big Trouble which describe sectarian squabbling within Haywood's defense committee and the obstruction of its fund-raising and organizing work by AFL bureaucrats bitterly opposed to the WFM's class-struggle approach. (The conservative Chicago Federation of Labor was pressured into holding a solidarity march but then tried to ban any display of red; the followers of Debs and DeLeon showed up with their usual crimson banners -- plus matching neckties.)

What will most modern-day readers make of Lukas' quaint lefty homicide case (particularly those who skip the book's full 875 pages and rely instead on the excerpt run in Vanity Fair of all places)? They'll probably be satisfied with the tidy little ending that some Simon and Schuster editor probably urged him to tack onto the book to "solve" the mystery of who was ultimately responsible for blowing Steunenberg away. This flimsy and unconvincing five-page epilogue has been widely criticized -- even by friendly reviewers -- for being unworthy of the exhaustive research that went into the rest of the book (which, after eight years, left the author so exhausted and depressed that he tragically took his own life shortly before its publication). The epilogue cites 86- year-old correspondence between several Socialists involved in Haywood's defense who later had a falling out among themselves during the trial of other accused labor dynamiters. According to Lukas, these letters contain proof that insiders agreed the WFM leaders were guilty of ordering the hit.

Who really decided to settle the miners' old score with Steunenberg, using a key tool of the their trade? Did anyone need to give the order? The crushing of the Coeur d'Alene struggle -- like major strike defeats before and since -- left much human wreckage, bitterness, and free-floating anger in its wake. There were many strike veterans who had the means, motive, and opportunity to retaliate later on. Steunenberg should have thought more about his eventual lack of immunity from avengers of the WFM's lost cause before he wired the White House for reinforcements and was told that the cavalry was on the way.

Contents of No. 25