Labor Activists

"I'm here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time."

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."

"I coulda got mad. But then I had to stop and think, well, what did he get in school? What did he get in his work experience? What did he get even from his own union, that gave him some tools to understand what he was seeing?"

"Talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator... You know, the light goes on, the light goes off; it's not going to do anything that isn't built into it... And I'm not going to talk to a conservative anymore than I talk to my damn refrigerator."

"I coulda got mad. But then I had to stop and think, well, what did he get in school? What did he get in his work experience? What did he get even from his own union, that gave him some tools to understand what he was seeing on that television?"

"But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read."

"You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!"

"We, the American People, are enormously wealthy. You know that? Who owns all of those trees in the national forests? (This is not a rhetorical question.) We do! Who owns all of that off-shore oil you read about in the newspaper, huh? We do! Who owns all of those minerals under the federal lands? We do! It’s public property, you know. But we elect people to go to Washington—who are those assholes?—what have we gotten ourselves into now?—they go to Washington, they lease off what we own, public property, to private companies to sell us back our own stuff for the sake of a greasy buck. That’s dumb."

"As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….""

"No root, no fruit."

"Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice … A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organised trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors."

"This is the agitator's work, this continual activity. And we lay awake many nights trying to think of something more we could give them to do. I remember one night in Lawrence none of us slept. The strike spirit was in danger of waning for lack of action. And I remember Bill Haywood said finally, "Let's get a picket line out in Essex street. Get every striker to put a little red ribbon on and walk up and down and show that the strike is not broken." A few days later the suggestion was carried out, and when they got out of their homes and saw this great body that they were, they had renewed strength and renewed energy which carried them along for many weeks more in the strike."

"Bill had always stood for a strong State and centralization. What was his One Big Union but a dictatorship?"

"He had jumped his bail, he said suddenly; he had run away. Not because of the twenty years of prison that faced him, though that was no small matter at his age. "Ridiculous, Bill," I interrupted; "you would never have to serve the whole sentence. Gene Debs was pardoned and Kate Richard O'Hare also." "Listen first," he interrupted; "the prison was not the deciding factor. It was Russia, Russia, which fulfilled what we had dreamed about and propagated all our lives, I as well as you. Russia, the home of the liberated proletariat, was calling me." He had also been urged by Moscow to come, he added. He was told he was needed in Russia. From here he would be able to revolutionize the American masses and to prepare them for the dictatorship of the proletariat. It had not been easy to decide to leave his comrades to face their long terms in prison alone. But the Revolution was more important and its ends justified all means."

"Bill Haywood had often been under our roof, by day and by night, always our welcome guest, our comrade in many battles, though not sharing the same ideas."

"Sasha was inclined to believe it; he had lost faith in Bill since 1914, when the latter had shown himself weak-kneed during the free-speech fights that Sasha had conducted in New York. I defended Bill hotly, pointing out that our actions are not always to be judged so easily."

"The gap left by the arrest of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti was immediately filled by Bill Haywood' and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Haywood's years of experience in the labour struggle, his determination and tact, made him a distinctive power in the Lawrence situation. On the other hand, Elizabeth's youth, charm, and eloquence easily won everybody's heart. The names of the two and their reputation gained for the strike country-wide publicity and support...Bill Haywood had but recently come to live in New York. We had met almost immediately and became very friendly. Bill also was not an anarchist, but, like Elizabeth, he was free from narrow sectarianism. He frankly admitted that he felt much more at home with the anarchists, and especially with the Mother Earth group, than with the zealots in his own ranks. The most notable characteristic of Bill was his extraordinary sensitiveness. This giant, outwardly so hard, would wince at a coarse word and tremble at the sight of pain. On one occasion, when he addressed our eleventh-of-November commemoration, he related to me the effect the crime of 1887 had had on him. He was but a youngster at the time, already working in the mines. "Since then," he told me, "our Chicago martyrs have been my greatest inspiration, their courage my guiding star." The apartment at 210 East Thirteenth Street became Bill's retreat. Frequently he spent his free evenings at our place. There he could read and rest to his heart's content, or drink coffee "black as the night, strong as the revolutionary ideal, sweet as love.""

"As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of "sabotage" and "violence," and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs's writings were far more inflammatory)."

"A suffragette once asked Bill Haywood, who leaned toward the anarcho-syndicalist faith, if he thought women should have the vote, and Bill said: "Sure, and besides, they can have mine." Such was the indifference to political action held by many who could see no hope in the ballot, nor in the whole set-up of parliaments, but put their full faith in the organization of labor."

"Bill Haywood, head of the I.W.W., was on the witness stand four days; and no juror ever dozed in that time; for always the story he told, in answer to questions by Vanderveer, was moving and vital. Through those questions Big Bill, with his large one-eyed head, bulky body, and small hands which seldom gestured, sat there and traced his own life struggle-as a boy in the mines, as an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners in territory where that meant risking death from gun-men's bullets, as a defendant in the famous trial in Boise, when he was one of three accused of conspiracy to kill, and of killing, ex-Governor Steunenberg of Idaho with dynamite; of his helping to organize the Socialist Party, and later the Industrial Workers of the World; and of his part in many of the I.W.W. strikes andfree speech conflicts across the land."

"In the brief span of its life, the IWW produced men who became internationally known and whose names were torches of inspiration in many lands. Most of them paid a high price for their fame, some with their lives...Bill Haywood, out of prison on bail while his war-time conviction was being appealed, was persuaded by New York Communists that world revolution was just around the corner and that he was needed in it. He skipped bail and fled to Russia, only to be relegated to the sidelines, and to die there a broken man."

"Bill Haywood, the one-eyed giant of the miners, hid out there. He talked to us and paced back and forth in the little wooden rooms. He was out on bail and he told us how you had to fight your weakness to be a fighter for the working class. He said he liked to drink and sometimes went on a spree, lurching in and out of saloons, brawling, taking on enemies, and reciting poetry. And then he would hole up and discipline himself for the working class, his class, and study Darwin and Morgan and London and Marx. Above all, he loved Shakespeare and would recite whole scenes. Sometimes, he said, he strengthened himself by fasts. Haywood said his first school was with the miners. Each one would have a book and they would pass them around, and there was always a student, a scholar, among them who went around teaching. From such a scholar he first heard the slogan "an injury to one is a injury to all." He told how he had first been impressed by the Haymarket martyrs. He felt that a great light shone from them. He seemed to me to have grown out of the mines and the gloom and terror like some giant plant, fed by the lives of the miners. He would tell about their maiming toil and about the color of the lead miners, a deathly ashen gray, for they were dying of lead poisoning. He mourned them all and fought for them all. I had never before seen a man like that."

"William "Big Bill" Haywood, the WFM's secretary-treasurer, began working in an Idaho silver mine at the age of nine; as an adult, he was one of the most fearsome and effective union organizers in America, a strapping frontier socialist with a missing eye and a booming, powerful voice that carried throughout the nation's union halls and picket lines. He went on to help cofound the IWW, lead influential strikes in the Northeast (including the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike), fight for the eight-hour workday, and later flee the country for Russia after decades of state persecution, but his time with the WFM is what first honed his radical sensibilities and his fervent belief in industrial unionism, the necessity of organizing the entire working class into "One Big Union.""

"At the same time that this Lawrence strike was going on, there was a great strike of timber workers in Louisiana, also under the auspices of the IWW, and I single that out, although we had strikes all over the place, we were just hopping all over from one place to another, because there for the first time the discrimination, the segregation rules were-broken down. William D. Haywood went down there to speak and he said every striker sits wherever he wants to sit. Segregation in this hall of the IWW and the Negro and white workers, I think for the first time in American labor history, broke that taboo and met together."

"Bill Haywood decided that we had to speak English so these people could understand it. And I will never forget the lesson he gave to us. I was very young at that time, I was 22, and he said, now listen here, you speak to these workers, these miners in the same kind of English that their children who are in the primary school would speak to them and they would understand that. Well, that's not easy -- to speak to them in primary school English. Well, we learned how to do it. The only trouble is with me it kind of stuck and when I go to speak to a college audience I feel at a little bit of a disadvantage because I don't know all the big words. The small words, the short words, were the ones I was drilled in by William Haywood."

""Big" Bill Haywood came out of jail a hero-a fitting symbol of the solidarity of labor. He was described by one reporter as, "big in body, in brain, and in courage." He made a triumphal tour of the United States and Canada, under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the labor organizations which had defended him. He was an intensely down-to-earth dramatic speaker. I remember hearing him say: "I'm a two-gun man from the West, you know," and while the audience waited breathlessly, he pulled his union card from one pocket and his Socialist card from the other."

"Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not stand by them to the shedding of the last drop of blood in our veins, we are disgraced forever and deserve the fate of cringing cowards. We are not responsible for the issue. It is not of our seeking. It has been forced upon us; and for the very reason that we deprecate violence and abhor bloodshed we cannot desert our comrades and allow them to be put to death. If they can be murdered without cause so can we, and so will we be dealt with at the pleasure of these tyrants. They have driven us to the wall and now let us rally our forces and face them and fight. If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least will meet them with guns. They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their tracks. The worm turns at last, and so does the worker."

"Sabotage means to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism."

"Tonight I am going to speak on the class struggle and I am going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understand it."

"The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood."

"The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!""

"Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep - eight hours a day! (From the Haymarket era eight-hour campaign)"

"The bandage will remain on the eyes of Justice as long as the Capitalist has the cut, shuffle, and deal."

"If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get."

"I've never read Marx's Capital, but I've got the marks of capital all over my body."

"[He made] remarkable effort to show that pacifism was by no means passivism and that there could be such a thing as a non-violent social revolution."

"In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist."

"Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved."

"[Their foremost task] … is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil — material and spiritual — this entails for the masses of men throughout the world.... So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression."

"We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society."

"There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force."

"There is no way to peace; peace is the way."

"It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good."

"We belong to the Society of Friends, a community of love, a family of persons. In so far as we are not just another “denomination,” we know also that the salvation of our age is in our keeping; that is, that it lies in the divine-human society which is "rooted and grounded in love." This is the unity which alone can make one world out of "one world", and not one nightmare, one hell, one burned-out cinder. We know also and in a way we respond to the fact that we have a mission, we are "called to be saints"."

"Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system."

"The psychological basis for the use of nonviolent methods is the simple rule that like produces like, kindness provokes kindness, as surely as injustice produces resentment and evil. It is sometimes forgotten by those whose pacifism is a spurious, namby-pamby thing that if one Biblical statement of this rule is "Do good to them that hate you" (an exhortation presumably intended for the capitalist as well as for the laborer), another statement of the same rule is, "They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." You get from the universe what you give, with interest! What if men build a system on violence and injustice, on not doing good to those who hate them nor even to those who meekly obey and toil for them? And persist in this course through centuries of Christian history? And if, then, the oppressed raise the chant:"

"There are two themes that ran through A.J. Muste's life so clearly and marked his own actions so decisively, that the conflict between them became a dialectic, never resolved. One theme was peace, nonviolence, profound reverence for life. The other theme was social justice. To respect life meant to struggle to achieve social justice, yet the struggle for social justice invariably disturbed the peace and risked the nonviolence so central to A.J. The life-destroying institutions of injustice which A.J. saw around him were intolerable--yet violent social change was also intolerable. It was this "dialectic" which led him into the Marxist-Leninist movement and then back into the religious pacifist movement. Those who worked most closely with him are convinced that he was never fully able to leave behind his Christian mysticism when he was a Marxist-Leninist, and that on his return to the Church he brought with him much of his Marxism. No authentic honor can be done to the memory of the man and his life if we select one theme and ignore the other. Few people have been so deeply committed at the same time both to peace and to social justice, so fully aware of the difficulty of reconciling these two demands, and so intent on making that effort."

"I am for the state only doing what people are unable to do in the absence of government action."

"When we get to the place in the development of our society where the tools of abundance can take care of the material needs of the outer man with less and less human effort, the real emphasis then has to be shifted to enabling the inner man to grow."

"The problems of tomorrow require whole new concepts of how a free economy can work. As the tools of production become more productive, it means that we've got to find the markets by which people can absorb this greater productivity. Unless the fruits of technology are shared among workers and stockholders and consumers more equitably, the economy gets in trouble because you develop a lag between the ability to create wealth on the one hand, and the inability of people to consume the wealth that we know how to create."