Haywood, William Dudley (1869–1928)

US labour leader. Elected treasurer-secretary of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in 1900, a member of the Socialist Party from 1901, and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, ‘Wobblies’) in 1905, his goal was to unite all unions in ‘one big union’. In 1905 Haywood was charged with involvement in the murder of Frank Stenunenberg, an anti-union politician and former governor of Idaho, and his acquittal in 1907 made him a hero of the labour movement. Arrested again for sedition during World War I, he spent his later years in exile in the USSR.

Haywood was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and became a miner at the age of nine. He joined the WFM in 1896 and by 1899 had become a national leader, steering the organization through several violent years of labour strife. Although acclaimed as a labour hero following his trial for conspiracy to murder, during which he was defended by the US liberal lawyer Clarence Darrow, his continued radicalism, including a call to destroy capitalism, led the WFM to withdraw from the IWW and dismiss Haywood. He was also dropped from the Socialist party's councils in 1912 for advocating violence. He went on to champion the organizing of unskilled workers and led textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, and Paterson, New Jersey in 1913. Convicted of violating wartime alien and sedition acts, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1918 but jumped bail and fled to the USSR in 1921.