Books Ive read and liked. William Dudley Big Bill Haywood was, from the 1880s till he was forced to flee America in 1919, and get political asylum shortly thereafter in then Red Soviet Revolutionary Russia when it was still led by revolutionary socialist leaders like V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, during a violent right-wing bipartisan US government witch-hunt against Communists, Socialists, and Industrial Workers of the World militant labor activists and leaders, and Haywood began writing this book about 2 years before he died a Red hero in Red Soviet Russias Moscow in 1928. Haywood was politically and economically active in so many labor strikes with, first, the Western Federation of Miners, then the Industrial Workers of the World, in both of which he was such a strong, vibrant, central figure and labor leader, that the number of strikes in which he was an activist is probably near countless. He was also a political leader in the left-wing of Eugene V. Debs Socialist Party from the 1890s up to the time when, in the split in the Socialist Party in 1918 with significant numbers of its working class members sympathetic with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a large number were expelled and became the basis of the American Communist movement in 1919-1920. Haywood was a political activist in the Socialist Party importantly till he realized how much the opportunist right-wing in the party leadership was doing all it could to drive him and other revolutionary left-wing-minded proletarian leaders and activists out of the Socialist Party leadership, at which point, around 1911 or so, Haywood immersed himself in the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World as his central organization and movement. He had, however, been a founding member of that labor organization, in Chicago, in 1905, and he chaired its founding conference in 1905 in Chicago, giving a famous speech in which he declared as his first line of the founding congress of the Industrial Workers of the World, This is the Continental Congress of the Working Class. Haywood was a strong activist in the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, but eventually encountered the same right-wing opportunism among some of his former comrades in the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, particularly Charles Moyer, and that drove him first to mainly embrace Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World Activism, then when the same sort of opportunism threatened him in the Socialist Party, he moved to the Industrial Workers of the World as his primary organization. But he was, like many revolutionary left-wing-minded working class people, deeply influenced by the Red revolutionary workers uprising in Russia in 1917 and their formation of elected Soviets, Workers Councils, as their form of government when the Bolsheviks led the workers to power in the November 1917 Revolution. When a right-wing Democratic Party U.S. government witch-hunt against every kind of left-wing radical in the country happened under Democratic President Wilsons red-baiting and red-hating attorney-general, A. Mitchell Palmer, in 1919, Haywood was one of the militant fighters for the working class caught up in the anti-Red witch-hunt. He was to be tried, and was let out on bail, but skipped the country and made his way, as mentioned, to Revolutionary Soviet Russia. He says in his book that his first words to Lenin on getting to Russia were, Comrade Lenin, are the factories controlled by the workers in Russia? He says, Lenin answered, Yes, Comrade Haywood. That is Communism. This is one of the truly great autobiographical memoirs by a major early 20th Century American radical labor union leader and organizer and activist in the American labor movement from the 1880s-1890s through to the start of the 1920s. I loved this book. I enthusiastically recommend it.: goodreads/book/show/1739856.The_Autobiography_of_Big_Bill_Haywood
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 05:59:10 +0000
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