WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

       3. UNDESIRABLE CITIZENS

       Two Lethal Bombings Focus Americans on Labor Wars

      The solid column swept past – painters, carpenters, hod-carriers, masons, iron workers – every sort of trade-union, each with its own banners – and an extraordinary number of bands all playing the Marseillaise . . . an indescribable color of martial zest . . . Here were 40,000 men marching in New York City . . . because three labor leaders are on trial for murder in a state two thousand miles away. [E]ven a conservative like myself could see . . . how effective it was . . . a sort of contagious fervor.

      – NORMAN HAPGOOD, EDITOR OF COLLIER’S WEEKLY, DESCRIBING THE MAY 4, 1907, SOCIALIST PARADE DOWN FIFTH AVENUE¹

      Big Bill Haywood had the intimidating look of a real-life Cyclops. He was built like an ox and had lost an eye in a childhood whittling accident. Haywood never bothered to obtain a glass eye. He wore a tall cowboy hat to tower over companions. On the rare occasions he took off his Stetson, the two-hundred-pound spokesman for the Western Federation of Miners stood just under six feet tall. He was clean-shaven with neatly parted short brown hair, oversized features and prominent jowls. When photographed, he presented a half-profile with only his good left eye facing the camera.

      The “Lincoln of Labor” was born in 1869 in the Utah territory where his father was a Pony Express rider. He was three when his father died and nine when he lost his right eye, the same year he first started working in the mines. Violent confrontations over union demands for worker safety, a $3 minimum daily wage and an eight-hour day were then common throughout the nation. Federal or state troops had to be called in to restore peace some five hundred times, almost always at the instigation of politically powerful industrialists.

      Haywood was an impressionable seventeen when Chicago’s infamous Haymarket Square riot broke out in May of 1886. He devoured newspaper accounts of how the mayhem started. First, police and private detectives killed six strikers. The following day an unknown protestor threw a bomb at the police, who responded by shooting into the crowd, some of whom returned gunfire. After the dust settled, seven policemen and three protesters were dead. About a hundred others were injured, most of them police officers. Eight leading anarchists and militant socialists who had addressed the May Day rally were tried for murder. All were convicted based solely on charges that the deaths were “the bloody fruit” of their “villainous teachings.”² Four were hanged in 1887. The hysteria-driven executions turned the four Haymarket Square rally organizers into instant martyrs for their cause.

      Local unions in frontier states were mired in similar bloody confrontations with owners of gold, silver, copper, lead and coal mines. The horrendous working conditions of rough-hewn, poorly educated men, who drank too hard and seldom enjoyed civilizing female companionship, created an extremely volatile situation. Miners typically worked ten hours a day, six days a week down dangerous shafts. One third of all men who worked a decade in gold and silver mines wound up seriously injured from falling rocks or from inhaling clouds of silica dust sent up by new “widow-maker” compressed air drills; one out of eight died in the mines.³

      It was easy to hate the big businessmen back East who exploited the mine workers. Only able-bodied men were paid. There was no workers’ compensation, no health benefits. Disabled workers simply lost their jobs and were replaced with others equally desperate for employment. The mining industry in the late 19th century made extensive use of dynamite as a new commercial blasting technique. By the mid-1880s, American anarchists and militant labor leaders had found other uses for Alfred Nobel’s invention.

      Banding together in unions that could cripple the mines with strikes was the mineworkers’ only hope to improve their lot. But management of the mines infiltrated unions with spies and resorted to private armies. The hired guns used brute force to break strikes and policed the mining facilities with rifles, killing strikers with impunity. Union members fought back with sabotage and violence against scabs. In 1892, alarmed by the increasing class violence in Idaho, President Benjamin Harrison sent out federal troops to conduct mass arrests of union members. Then came the devastating financial collapse of 1893. It caused a ripple effect of bankruptcies and a surplus of out-of-work laborers competing for jobs in the mines.

      Facing wage cuts, strikebreakers, armed company guards, and mass arrests, union members in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Utah and South Dakota merged to form the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The WFM almost instantaneously developed a reputation as the most militant union in the country. By the turn of the century, pitched battles between the WFM and state-supported owners would become known as the Colorado Labor Wars. It was the closest the United States “has ever approached outright class warfare.”⁴

      Haywood was twenty-seven when he joined the WFM in 1896. An impassioned speaker, he rose quickly to national prominence as a champion of labor’s goals, shouting to enthusiastic crowds, “Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep.”⁵ By May of 1907, the burly activist had served on the Executive Board of the WFM for seven years. President Theodore Roosevelt immediately took keen interest when Haywood was accused with two other WFM leaders of ordering the assassination of Idaho’s former Governor Frank Steunenberg. The bombing death looked all too much like WFM payback for the governor having called in federal troops to impose martial law to end Idaho’s labor wars. Executing the leadership of the WFM for that crime could throttle the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World in its infancy.

      In 1896, Steunenberg had been nominated as both the Democratic and Populist candidate for Idaho’s governor. Both groups enthusiastically endorsed thirty-six-year-old Nebraskan firebrand William Jennings Bryan for President that year in hopes of revitalizing the nation’s economy with silver-backed currency. Though McKinley defeated Bryan, Steunenberg had won the Idaho election, with labor union backers and the vote of “Silver” Republicans, by a comfortable margin. Steunenberg became the first non-Republican to hold that office since the rough and tumble remnant of Eastern “Oregon country” was admitted to the union in 1890, a year after its neighboring states of Montana and Washington.

      Steunenberg was reelected in 1898 with a smaller majority, which still included the support of union men. During his second term, antagonism reached the boiling point between the WFM and the owners of the Bunker Hill concentrator. A $250,000 smelting plant in Wardner, Idaho, the Bunker Hill concentrator had been recognized when built as the largest such facility on the planet. (It would be a multi-million-dollar investment in today’s dollars.) Unlike most other mine owners, the San Francisco owners of Bunker Hill still adamantly refused to recognize unions. The facility’s president had recently gone a step further and begun purging Irish miners from his work force as un-American agitators. On April 29, 1899, local union members in Burke, Idaho, retaliated with a breathtakingly bold act of sabotage.

      Scores of armed union men kept the employees of the Bunker Hill concentrator at bay while another couple of hundred masked associates – armed with rifles, bats and shotguns – commandeered a train. They brought the train to Wardner and unloaded sixty dynamite cartons, which a few volunteers then placed at strategic points under the concentrator. Then all of the men high-tailed it out of Wardner just before the explosives blew the concentrator and nearby buildings to smithereens. The union’s extraordinary violence shocked Governor Steunenberg. At the demands of the irate railroad and Coeur D’Alene mine owners, the governor surprised the union by re-imposing martial law to restore order. With his own National Guard off serving in the Spanish-American War, Steunenberg asked President McKinley to deploy federal troops. Within days, the President purposely chose to send veteran black soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment to quell the uprising, knowing how insulted the miners would be.

      The segregated soldiers of the 24th Infantry had been the most heroic American combatants at San Juan Hill, in the recent Spanish-American War, though Assistant Secretary of War Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had received most of the credit. But the regiment of black soldiers was bitter at the prejudice the men suffered upon their return and increasingly fractious. Now they had an outlet for their frustration – strict orders from their white officers