U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [39]
men who met by chance and stopped the night in the
abandoned ranch. Each of them had lost an eye, they were the only oneeyed men in the county.
They lost the homestead, things went to pieces,
his wife was sick, he had children to support. He went to work as a miher at Silver City. At Silver City, Idaho, he joined the W.F.M.,
there he held his first union office; he was delegate of the Silver City miners to the convention of the West-ern Federation of Miners held in. Salt Lake City in '98. From then on he was an organizer, a speaker, an
exhorter, the wants of al the miners were his wants; he fought Coeur D'Alenes, Tel uride, Cripple Creek, joined the Socialist Party, wrote and spoke
through Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Colorado to
miners striking for an eight hour day, better living, a share of the wealth they hacked out of the hil s.
In Chicago in January 1905 a conference was
cal ed that met at the same hal in Lake Street where
-94-the Chicago anarchists had addressed meetings twenty years before. Wil iam D. Haywood was permanent chairman.
It was this conference that wrote the manifesto that brought into being the I.W.W. When he got back to Denver he was kidnapped
to Idaho and tried with Moyer and Pettibone for the murder of the sheepherder Steuenberg, exgovernor of Idaho, blown up by a bomb in his own home.
When they were acquitted at Boise ( Darrow was
their lawyer) Big Bil Haywood was known as a
workingclass leader from coast to coast.
Now the wants of al the workers were his wants,
he was the spokesman of the West, of the cowboys and the lumberjacks and the harvesthands and the miners. (The steamdril had thrown thousands of miners out of work; the steamdril had thrown a scare into al the miners of the West.) The W.F.M. was going conservative. Haywood
worked with the I.W.W. building a new society in the shell of the old, campaigned for Debs for President in 1908 on the Red Special. He was in on al the big strikes in the East where revolutionary spirit was grow-ing, Lawrence, Paterson, the strike of the Minnesota ironworkers.
They went over with the A.E.F. to save the Mor-gan loans, to save Wilsonian Democracy, they stood at Napoleon's tomb and dreamed empire, they had cham-pagne cocktails at the Ritz bar and slept with Russian countesses in Montmartre and dreamed empire, al over the country at American legion posts and business men's luncheons it was worth money to make the eagle scream;
they lynched the pacifists and the proGermans
and the wobblies and the reds and the bolsheviks.
-95-Bil Haywood stood trial with the hundred and
one at Chicago where Judge Landis the basebal czar with the lack of formality of a traffic court
handed out his twenty year sentences and thirty-thousand dol ar fines. After two years in Leavenworth they let them
bail out Big Bil (he was fifty years old a heavy broken man), the war was over but they'd learned empire in the Hal of the Mirrors at Versail es;
the courts refused a new trial.
It was up to Haywood to jump his bail or to go
back to prison for twenty years.
He was sick with diabetes, he had had a rough
life, prison had broken down his health. Russia was a workers' republic; he went to Russia and was in
Moscow a couple of years but he wasn't happy there, that world was too strange for him. He died there
and they burned his big broken hulk of a body and
buried the ashes under the Kremlin wal .
THE CAMERA EYE (10)
the old major who used to take me to the Capitol
when the Senate and the House of Representatives were in session had been in the commissary of the Confederate Army and had very beautiful manners so the attendants bowed to the old major except for the pages who were little boys not much older than your brother was a page in the Senate once and occasional y a Representative or a Senator would look at him with slit eyes may be some-body and bow or shake hearty or raise a hand
-96-the old major dressed very wel in a morningcoat