IWW Leader William D "Big Bill" Haywood, Mugshot Taken at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas 1918
Big Bill Haywood, leader of the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, was arrested and tried, along with more than 100 other IWW members, for calling for international working class solidarity and urging young men to avoid the World War I draft. He was convicted to violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to serve 20 years in the prison at Leavenworth. Knowing he would not receive justice, he fled the country while he was out on bail during an appeals trial. He fled to the new, revolutionary Russian SFSR (predecessor to the USSR), where even though he was not a communist, he was greeted as a hero. He spent the brief remainder of his life in exile in Soviet Russia.
"You ask me why the IWW is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down…if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a businessman's war and we don't see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy." Big Bill Haywood, on IWW opposition to World War I.
