Biography
William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood was the founding general secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the Wobblies) and one of the most important figures in U.S. radical labor history. A one-eyed former Western miner, he led the Western Federation of Miners and was acquitted in the 1907 Steunenberg murder trial, defended by Clarence Darrow. In September 1917 federal agents raided IWW offices across the country and arrested its leaders; the resulting mass federal trial in Chicago — United States v. Haywood et al., before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis — was the largest political prosecution in U.S. history at that point. After a four-month trial, on August 17, 1918, the jury convicted 101 of the 113 IWW defendants, and Haywood was sentenced on August 30, 1918 to twenty years in federal prison and a $20,000 fine. While free on $30,000 bail pending appeal in March 1921, Haywood jumped bail and fled to Soviet Russia, where he died on May 18, 1928; his ashes were divided between the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow and the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Forest Park, Illinois.
