The View From 1776

-------------------
Mr. Alan Johnstone, who disagrees with my assessment of the labor union activists who organized the IWW, kindly emailed a review of the trial of William “Big Bill” Haywood for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg.  The full description can be viewed on the University of Missouri Law School website.

The following excerpts are even more damning than what I wrote earlier:

“The 1890’s had been a time of unprecedented violence in Idaho’s silver mines. Federal troops were called to Idaho three separate times to combat union-sponsored terrorism that had resulted in many deaths and extensive property damage to mining company property, the last time being an eighteen-month occupation from May, 1898 to November, 1899 undertaken at the urging of Governor Frank Steunenberg. Steunenberg asked President McKinley to send troops after union miners hijacked a train and planted sixty boxes of dynamite beneath the world’s largest concentrator, owned by the Bunker Hill Mining Company of Wardner, Idaho, blowing it and several nearby buildings to smithereens.”

IWW union member Harry Orchard was called by the prosecutor in the Haywood trial to testify about the activities of the unionists leading up to the murder of governor Steunenberg. 

“On April 29, 1898, Orchard was, he said, one of the thousand or so miners who hijacked a Northern Pacific train, diverted it to Wardner, then blew up the Bunker Hill concentrator, killing two men:

     “Who lit the fuse?”

     “I lit one of them. I don’t know who lit the rest.”

Orchard testified that he evaded arrest by hiding out in the hills above Burke, then making his way to Butte, Montana which was then the headquarters of the WFM [Western Federation of Miners, a member union of the IWW].  His career as a union killer began in 1903 when he blew up the Vindicator mine in Colorado for $500, killing two.  In 1904, he dynamited the train depot in Independence, Colorado, killing thirteen non-union miners. Later, under orders of Haywood and Pettibone, Orchard said that he attempted assassinations of the governor of Colorado, two Colorado Supreme Court justices, and the president of a mining company. The attempts all failed, although one bomb intended for a justice killed an innocent bystander instead.  Orchard testified that he was the fifth man hired by Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone to assassinate Steunenberg.  He testified that when he was hired Haywood said to him, “Steunenberg has lived seven years too long."  His reward for a successful job was to be several hundred dollars and a ranch.  The purpose of the Steunenberg assassination, according to Orchard, was to strike fear in any politician who might consider actions that would frustrate WFM goals.”

“The state concluded its case by introducing articles from a WFM publication, Miner’s Magazine, that revealed a deep hatred of Steunenberg and sardonic pleasure over his passing.....”

Clarence Darrow was one of two attorneys defending Mr. Haywood.

Mr. Darrow after the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1917 began a long association with that group, always challenging and seeking to discredit the fundamental ideas of decency, morality, and Constitutional government that underlay the birth of our nation.  Needless to say, he has been often depicted as a great hero by the liberal-Progressive elements of our media, as well as by liberal novelists, historians, and dramatists, whose beliefs and aims coincide with those of Mr. Darrow and the ACLU.  As the Wikipedia notes: “Darrow was the inspiration for the character of Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play based on the Scopes trial. Drummond was played by Paul Muni in the original Broadway cast, by George C. Scott in a 1996 Broadway revival, and by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 feature film.”

Mr. Darrow was a secular agnostic who believed, as liberal-Progressives do still today, that the death penalty is worse than committing murder.  One of Mr. Darrow’s claims to fame was his 1924 defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two young men, from wealthy families in the Chicago area, who had murdered purely for the thrill of doing so.  To the ACLU, murder is a minor thing if it presents the opportunity to damage public confidence that heinous crime will result in appropriate punishment of criminals and therefore justice for society and the victims of crime.

It was in that vein that he defended union leader Haywood in the Steunenberg murder trial.  In his closing summation to the jury, Mr. Darrow said:

“I don’t mean to tell this jury that labor organizations do no wrong. I know them too well for that. They do wrong often, and sometimes brutally; they are sometimes cruel; they are often unjust; they are frequently corrupt. . .But I am here to say that in a great cause these labor organizations, despised and weak and outlawed as they generally are, have stood for the poor, they have stood for the weak, they have stood for every human law that was ever placed upon the statute books. They stood for human life, they stood for the father who was bound down by his task, they stood for the wife, threatened to be taken from the home to work by his side, and they have stood for the little child who was also taken to work in their places--that the rich could grow richer still, and they have fought for the right of the little one, to give him a little of life, a little comfort while he is young. I don’t care how many wrongs they committed, I don’t care how many crimes these weak, rough, rugged, unlettered men who often know no other power but the brute force of their strong right arm, who find themselves bound and confined and impaired whichever way they turn, who look up and worship the god of might as the only god that they know--I don’t care how often they fail, how many brutalities they are guilty of. I know their cause is just.”

Even Mr. Darrow did not deny the violence of labor union radicals, but in typical ACLU fashion, suggested that unionists (and their anarchist and socialist allies) were justified in any degree of violence by the existence of a government that supported private property rights. 

What the IWW stood for, and liberal-Progressives still stand for, is the self-important conviction that there is no Supreme God Who created the universe.  Just Mr. Darrow’s “god of might,” John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophical thesis that Darwin had destroyed the concept of moral right and wrong, and therefore any means are justified if they achieve the perpetrator’s desires. 

What the IWW stood for was Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, a war of all against all, in which life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Visit MoveOff Network Members