"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Meridel Le Sueur "The Ancient People and the Newly Come" (1976)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Bill Haywood
William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood (February 4, 1869 – May 18, 1928) was a prominent figure in American radical unionism as a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and later as a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
24 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Bill Haywood →
Related Quotes
"The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood."
"I've never read Marx's Capital, but I've got the marks of capital all over my body."
"If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get."
"The bandage will remain on the eyes of Justice as long as the Capitalist has the cut, shuffle, and deal."
"Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep - eight hours a day! (From the Haymarket era eight-hou…"
"The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alc…"
"Sabotage means to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism."
"Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not stand by them to the shedding of the last drop…"
"This is the agitator's work, this continual activity. And we lay awake many nights trying to think of something more …"
"Tonight I am going to speak on the class struggle and I am going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understan…"