The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Bill Haywood and The Militant Miners Exactly 50 years ago, a trade-union man in the state of Idaho confessed that he had dynamited 18 men into Kingdom Come....
...The author could have taken any one of them as his focus...
...In the first place, Holbrook has not turned the man into a hero...
...Dozens of authors and other celebrities were on hand...
...He had a doctrine...
...His dream of working-class leadership had faded...
...He seemed to have the makings of an organization...
...The First World War came...
...Had I been writing it, I would have centered the narrative on William D. Haywood...
...When Haywood and Yin-cent St...
...But in the words of Haywood, Moyer and their crowd we have plenty of suggestions of Eastern industrial unionism and French syndicalism...
...He has, with us, shuddered at the way in which this calm and untroubled man destroyed property and blew his enemies to bits...
...In the metal mines, the men were on familiar terms with dynamite and made use of it for defensive purposes with sure technical skill...
...Were Bill Haywood here now, I can imagine his comments...
...In America, the IWW was to be at the heart of this conquest of power...
...There were many who could see Haywood as the first Socialist President of the United States...
...One evening in 1919, I had dinner with Haywood in the old Civic Club...
...There was not as much consternation as some one of this generation would expect...
...It was an age of violence...
...The next day, the newspapers reported that the man had jumped bail and was on the way to Russia...
...He was, moreover, the frontier revolutionist most definitely connected with IWW activities in the East and, finally, with the world-shaking events in Russia...
...One can, of course, think of these militant metal-diggers as mere frontiersmen fighting against the painful restraints of industrial production...
...The American Federation of Labor, with Samuel Gompers at its head, was ridiculed as the American Fakirization of Labor...
...And the victory of the working class was to be clamped down and solidified by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...All the dynamite explosions, all the parades and mass meetings had left nothing but bitter memories...
...He has tried to understand and explain him...
...As the proceedings went on, parades and mass meetings drew attention to them from one end of the country to the other...
...The so-called militant Socialists turned Communist, and the final impulses of the Rocky Mountain Revolution dwindled away...
...Finally, Haywood turned Communist...
...Ethel Barrymore, in town with a roadshow, thought Orchard looked like a respectable grocer...
...When that intellectual battle was finished, Haywood himself realized that he had been beaten...
...All through the meal, the fading hero was melancholy and reminiscent...
...John went to Chicago to help found the Industrial Workers of the World, they met Daniel DeLeon and other leaders of the Socialist Labor party who were trying hard to get a hearing for industrial unionism...
...He and his followers believed in the class struggle carried on by means of the general strike and, if necessary, violence...
...Holbrook could do more to connect his revolution with the world of that time...
...Within the Socialist party, he had an active following reaching up into the Executive Committee...
...What most old Socialists recall is the great debate between Haywood and Morris Hillquit in Cooper Union...
...Orchard was to him the lowest-down creature God ever made...
...He was the biggest man of the lot and the only one whom I knew well...
...He was not a mere individual...
...When the Boise jury declared Haywood not guilty, the man instantly turned hero...
...The representative of democratic Socialism and of regular American trade-unionism had won the day...
...But author Holbrook, who has a sure instinct for a story, has made Harry Orchard his pivot character...
...Bill Haywood, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Western Federation, was, of course, the man who was prosecuted in the famous trial at Boise, Idaho...
...It was here that he told his lurid tale...
...A part of the story of this hectic era has been made into an engaging book by that untiring gleaner after our conventional historians, Stewart H. Holbrook (The Rocky Mountain Revolution, Holt, $3.95...
...Soldiers, police and sheriff's deputies shot down strikers...
...He has related in detail how he made his bombs and placed them in his victims' paths...
...The verdict released a hurricane of enthusiasm...
...The purpose of the whole operation was to destroy the union— and Orchard was the chief instrument through whom this object was to be achieved...
...Fifty-four newspapers and press associations had their best men listening in...
...He was a traitor, a fink, a crawling cringer to the capitalist enemy...
...No trial in the history of the country had been so publicized...
...Amid these brilliant protagonists sat the killer who had started life as a milkman...
...Fighting American individualists surrendered their most characteristic quality to Russian totalitarians...
...How could a decent fellow like Holbrook make a hero out of him...
...It was here that Clarence Darrow and William Borah faced each other like gladiators...
...This story abounds in dramatic and picturesque characters...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 6
