Big Bill Haywood was a renowned leader with mine and other unions, and a founder of the IWW in the turbulent years of the early 1900s. He was put on trial for murder in Boise.
Former Idaho Governor Steunenberg had been assassinated outside his home. The authorities went gunning for Union leaders. A lower level operative, Harry Orchard, with a long troubled record, was jailed. Orchard finally took a deal and squealed – implicating Haywood and others.
Then a former Pinkerton detective, James McParland, who had earlier infiltrated and helped bring down the Molly Maguires, aided in a kind of within-the-US-rendition of Haywood. Haywood was abducted from Colorado, and whisked to Idaho on a “special train”.
Wikipedia describes the event:
McParland then used perjured extradition papers, which falsely stated that WFM leaders had been at the scene of the Steunenberg murder,[17] to cross the state line into Denver, Colorado and arrest Haywood, Moyer, and George Pettibone.[6] On February 17, 1906, in what writer Peter Carlson described as a “kidnapping scheme,”[17] McParland forced the three men onto a special train and extradited them to Idaho before the courts in Denver could intervene.[18] The abductions were so egregious that even American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, who had little good to say about the WFM, directed his union to raise funds for the defense.[19] Yet a habeas corpus appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, with only Justice Joseph McKenna dissenting.[20]
Mother Jones autobiography describes how this train had the right of way over every other train on the line from Denver to Boise, and then:
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.
More...
No comments:
Post a Comment