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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 31, 1909
Oakland, California – Big Bill Haywood Speaks to Trade Unionists
From the Oakland Tribune of March 30, 1909:
“LABOR MUST ENTER POLITICS,”
CRIES HAYWOOD TO GREAT THRONG
—–‘ROASTS’ RICH AND MINISTERS
—–
Pastors Afraid to tell Truth About
Money-Devil, He Says
—–DEMANDS FULL RETURN OF TOIL
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Speaker Urges Workers Not to Let Others
Idle Away Their Earnings
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Many of the leaders of labor say that your industrial organization should not mix in politics. That is all wrong. Although I am addressing you tonight under the auspices of three of your most powerful local central labor bodies, I am not afraid to declare to you that the man who advises you to keep politics out of your organization is the worst enemy you ever had, be he ever so powerful a factor in the councils of your association.
And I will go a step further. The man who tells you that the interests of capital and labor are mutual and that they should work hand in hand, is either a fool or a knave.
When William Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners uttered these words with dramatic force from the platform in Rice’s Institute, corner of Seventeenth street and San Pablo avenue, last night, they were like a firebrand applied to a powder house. The audience cheered them to the echo and manifested in every other possible way its-hearty concurrence in the sentiment.
Entertaining Speaker
Haywood is a forceful and entertaining speaker, and running through his discourse there was a vein of humor that sparkled. He appeared under the auspices of the Central Labor Council, the
Building Trades Council and the District Council of Carpenters and the audience that greeted him filled the hall. It represented the Socialistic element of local trades unionism and before the meeting was long under way Socialistic principles were being expounded by Haywood with rapid fire fervency. It is this Haywood who was tried in Idaho for alleged complicity in the assassination of Governor Steunenborg [Steunenberg]. After getting out of his trouble he invaded the lecture field and during the recent presidential campaign delivered a series of speeches for the Socialist ticket.
President A. M. Thompson of the California State Federation of Labor presided over the meeting. In introducing Haywood he referred to the big miner as the martyr of labor unionism, and when the latter stepped to the front to begin his address the sympathetic audience tendered him an ovation of which any speaker might have been proud.
Ripped up Capital
Haywood opened by briefly expressing his thanks for the friendly manner in which he had been welcomed and then he plunged into a slam-bang denunciation of plutocracy and the old-line political parties. It is unnecessary to speak at length of the arguments he presented to show that capital was the enemy of labor, and had the country bound down and at its mercy, because nearly everybody has heard some Socialist orator expound the principles of that party and in this respect Haywood was no exception to the rule. There is more entertainment in some of the bright things that cropped out during the run of his discourse.
[Exclaimed Haywood, with arms extended:]
Touch a corporation in the pocket book, and you touch it in the only place it has a soul.
He said the history of the Western Federation of Miners was the history of the great struggle of the masses against the classes. It was the history of the struggle between those who had little and got nothing and those who gave little and took all.
[Said the speaker:]
While President Taft was touring the country during the recent national campaign and telling us all about that great wave of prosperity that would sweep over the country when he got into the White House, the wage-earner was starving. And now we have Taft in the presidential chair, but where is the prosperity he promised us? Have any of you felt its beneficent influences over your daily toil? Most assuredly you have not. On the contrary there is idleness everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of your fellow wage-earners are starving today in the midst of plenty.
Moneyed Interests
Streams of tramps are flowing thorough the country from one end to the other, and in the face of all the misery and suffering among the people who were buncoed into voting for the Republican candidate the government at Washington is as firmly within the grip of the moneyed interests as it ever was.
Haywood also paid his respects to William Jennings Bryan.
[Said the speaker:]
Why, Bryan’s political arguments are like the River Platte-they are a thousand miles long and a foot deep.
Touching upon the prohibition question Haywood said that no movement had yet been inaugurated that would stop the sale of whisky-even in that decorous and staid college town of Berkeley.
Demands Justice
[Said Haywood, discussing the objects of trades unionism:]
The wage-earner does not ask for charity. They spurn and despise it. All we ask is justice and we’re gong to have it. We have a right to beg, borrow or steal, but we have no right to starve. Starvation in this great and glorious land of liberty and plenty is nothing short of suicide, and suicide, as you all well know (Haywood said this with a merry twinkle in his eye), is against the law!
Haywood said that Christ allowed his disciples to steal corn to appease their hunger; Cardinal Manning told the striking dock workers of London that it was no crime for them to rob the warehouses which were bulging with provisions to stave off starvation, and Abe Lincoln, when he heard that his gallant soldiers were going hungry in the midst of plenty of other people’s property, issued an order for them to break down and take what they needed.
Where the Crime?
If such men as Christ, Cardinal Manning and the martyred Lincoln could see no harm in stealing bread to preserve life in the body, is there any crime in our starving wage-earners doing the same?
He followed up this line of argument with the following apt illustration:
If a mule walking up he street should see a large, luscious cabbage protruding temptingly over the end-gate of a wagon ahead, wouldn’t he grab the cabbage? Well, haven’t you as much sense as your long-eared brother from Missouri?
But you haven’t, and I’ll show you why. You are the workers who are producing all the great wealth of the land, and all that is best in it to make life worth living. Are you getting your share? Are you getting any part of the luscious cabbage? No, you are giving the best of your brawn and brains to the aristocracy and in return the moneyed interests are giving you a measly little 17 per cent of the wealth that is yours by right of creation. That is why you haven’t as much sense as the donkey.
After Whole Cabbage
But we are gradually waking up to a full realization of our rights and the time will come when the masses will refuse to whack up any longer. They’re going to take the whole cabbage, see if they don’t. The time is not far distant when we will say to the capitalist in the language of Lincoln, “Root, hog, or die”
Scores Ministers
Haywood paid his compliments to the ministers of the gospel.
They don’t dare to tell the truth about the oppression of the masses-about the devastation that the money-devil is spreading over the country. If they did they would lose their jobs. They are the tools of the plutocracy-the money kings who are robbing our children of the necessities of life and hiding their sins against Christ and their fellow-men under the altars of their churches.
The speaker said that the present-day military establishment of the country was being maintained in the interests of the commercial pirates who are profiting off what union labor is producing, and then he took a fling at the idle rich.
Dogs and Babies
Look at the dames of fashionable Van Ness, with their screw-tailed terriers decked out with diamond-studded collars, wasting your hard-earned money on directoires, that make them vulgar, and high living that undermines their constitution. Why are they permitted to buy expensive lap dogs when they could go to any orphanage and get a baby for nothing? Whatever tendency there may be in this country to race suicide and degeneration it is confined to the shoddy aristocracy which has builded upon sweat of your brow.
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[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCE
Oakland Tribune
(Oakland, California)
-Mar 30, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/72436098/
IMAGE
Haywood, AtR, Feb 16, 1907
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67586811/
See also:
Tag: Big Bill Haywood
https://weneverforget.org/tag/big-bill-haywood/
I believe that the photo from original article is actually not Big Bill Haywood. The photo might be of James Maher, who was Secretary-Treasurer of the WFM before Haywood. This photo appears in a few newspapers from about May 1908 to about March 1909, labeled as a photo of Haywood. More research needed. Perhaps one day a facial recognition expert will settle this question for us.
Question: William D Haywood?
-or James Maher, Secretary-Treasurer of WFM before Haywood?
See Cripple Creek, Langdon
https://www.newspapers.com/image/72436098/
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/langdon16.html
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Banks of Marble – by Pete Seeger