MOYER, HAYWOOD AND PETTIBONE
The year 1906 I was active in the defense of Moyer, Haywood and
Pettibone. I addressed meetings in their behalf and raised money to
defray the expense of their trials.
Late on Saturday night, February 17th, 1906, after banks, business
houses and courts had closed, the President of the Western Federation
of Miners, Charles H. Moyer, was secretly arrested. William D. Haywood,
the secretary of the union, and George A. Pettibone, a business agent,
were arrested a short time later. All three men were kidnapped and
carried into the state of Idaho where they were charged with the murder
of Governor Steunenberg.
No legal steps to arrest these men, who were going about their business
openly, were taken. The men designated by the governor of Idaho to take
the requisitions to the Governor of Colorado had many days in which the
labor men could have been legally arrested. But the police waited until
Saturday night when the accused could not get in touch with banks for
bail, when the courts were not open to hear habeas corpus proceedings,
so that the prisoners could not have recourse to the usual legal
defense and protection granted to the worst felon.
The men were taken secretly to the county jail and were not allowed
to get in touch with relatives, friends or attorneys. Early Sunday
morning, before five o’clock, the prisoners were driven to a siding
near the Union Depot, placed in a special train, and whirled rapidly
out of the state. No stops were made and the train had the right-of-way
over every other train from Denver to Boise, Idaho.
The men were heavily guarded by armed men, commissioned by the Governor
of Idaho, and by Adjutant General Wells, of the Colorado National Guard.
When the men arrived in Boise, they were taken to the penitentiary and
placed incommunicado. Not for days did their families and friends know
of their whereabouts.
Back of the arrest of the labor leaders was the labor struggle itself.
Much of the labor war in Idaho had centered about the Coeur d’Alene
district, a strip of country about twenty-five miles long and five wide
in which were rich lead mines. The miners worked twelve hours a day in
the mills and smelters and mines, in the midst of sickening, deadly
fumes of arsenic. Arsenic poisons. It paralyzes arms and legs. It
causes the teeth to fall out, the hair to fall off. Weird looking men
worked in the mines: gaunt, their faces sunken in, their eyelashes and
eyebrows off, a green aspect to their skin.
Then came the union, the Western Federation of Miners. The mine owners
opposed the formation of unions with all the might of money and
privilege and state. The miners fought back as savagely as they were
fought. The strike was truly war with murders and assassinations, with
dynamite and prisons. The mine owners brought in gunmen. The President
of the Union urged the miners to arm to defend themselves, their wives
and daughters. It was Hell!
In 1899 Bunker Hill Co. mine was blown up. The Governor called the
troops which only made matters worse. The first troops were negroes.
Men were arrested and thrown in jail without trial. One thousand men
were herded in a bullpen.
One night a bomb, attached to his gate, killed Governor Steunenberg.
Rewards of thousands of dollars were offered for the arrest of the
murderers. That attracted the detectives. The Pinkerton Agency got
busy. Eight years after the death of the governor, the labor leaders
were arrested and charged with the crime of murder.
In those eight years the Western Federation of Miners had won the
battle in the Coeur d’Alene district. An eight-hour day had been won.
The miners had established their own stores. They had built libraries
and hospitals. They had established funds for widows and orphans.
Libraries took the place of saloons and hope the place of despair.
The mine owners paid spies to join the union, poor wretches who sold
themselves to the slave owners for a pittance.
A poor tool of the corporations, of the detectives, a thing in the
shape of a man, named Orchard, told of belonging to an inner circle
of the Western Federation of Miners whose object it was to dynamite
and assassinate. It was this inner circle to which the officers of the
union belonged, and it was this circle, said he, that was responsible
for the death, eight years before, of Governor Steunenberg.
The trial was held in Boise, Idaho. President Roosevelt called the men
“undesirable citizens” before they had been given a chance to defend
themselves. In the end they were acquitted and those who sought to
destroy them because of their labor in behalf of toiling humanity had
to seek other methods of destroying the Western Federation of Miners.