An early major statement of belief and of perspective from William D. Haywood. A pivotal experience in shifting the U.S. left and workers’ movement. While already well-known and respected in the Western workers’ movement as rank-and-file miner and late militant leader of the Western Federation of Miners, it was Haywood’s sensational 1907 trial that brought him to the national stage. Thereafter, ‘Big Bill’ was one of the most recognizable persons in the country, and undisputed embodiment of militant labor. After leading massive Colorado strike, top W.F.M. leaders Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone were kidnapped and brought to trial in Idaho on the trumped-up, and thoroughly ridiculous, charges of the 1905 bombing murder of state’s former governor Frank Steunenberg (actually committed by Harry Orchard, the accuser and state’s star witness). From prison Haywood ran for Colorado Governor on the Socialist Party ticket, which he had joined in 1901. Winning 16,000 votes or about 8%. Haywood and his comrades were successfully defended by Clarence Darrow in a trial that captured the country’s imagination. Haywood’s courthouse speeches and demeanor were widely reported in the left, labor, and mainstream press and helped to reformulate what the labor movement was. Haywood and his comrades were acquitted in July, 1907 and immediately embarked on a sold-out tour, spreading the gospel of industrial unionism and self-emancipation.

‘My Beliefs’ by William D. Haywood from Appeal to Reason. No. 570. November 3, 1906.

To appreciate the political situation in Colorado it is necessary to consider the gigantic industrial corporations that have acquired vast interests in the state. The monopolies that are so bitterly complained of throughout the nation are probably more strongly entrenched in Colorado than in any other state of the union. The wonderful resources of the most bountiful section of the West have been a most attractive field of operation for the worshippers of Mammon. Every field of industrial) activity is being relentlessly squeezed for the precious red golden drops to fill the cup that runs sweet to foreign stockholders. From the wine press of insatiable greed Colorado is left naught but the dregs, a miserable stipend in wages. A poor recompense indeed for her bountiful harvest of riches.

Not satisfied with plethoric dividends flowing to their coffers in a steady shining stream, the entities without a soul would increase the golden flood, even at the cost of burdening the state with cheap labor. The corporations are responsible for the induction of a class of people that otherwise would not have reached the state or any portion of the West for many years to come: the industrial centers are now populated with a poor, hopeless, heterogeneous people speaking the many languages of Babel. This particularly applies to the mines and plants operated by the Colorado Fuel and Iron company, the Arkansas Valley, Pueblo and Denver works of the American Smelting and Refining company, and the agricultural districts where the succulent beet is produced for the Sugar Trust. The trusts in question are no wise different from other trusts, and would not provoke comment other than is generally applied when discussing acquisition and operation of industry by a producing class government. The trusts of Colorado are national in scope to the extent of being interlocked, inter-woven with the “Interests” so ably represented by the majority of the United States senate. Un- fortunately or, perhaps, fortunately, this state is fastened upon by more of the life-sapping tentacles of the “System” than are other localities. With the natural instinct of uniting for mutual protection, so quickly grasped and understood by all animate creatures (excepting the laboring masses), all corporations of Colorado are in a junta. not inaptly termed a corporation political cabal. With unerring acumen, this cabal has forced its emissaries into every political party where the interests of organized capital can be subserved. This has been so successfully manipulated that now the republican and democratic parties of Colorado are the recognized and openly avowed auxiliaries of the corporations. The de cent, respectable element that have been engulfed in the maelstrom of corruption are crying aloud in distress; thousands of them are battling bravely to reach the only safe haven of refuge—Socialism. They have many obstacles to over- come, such as independents, municipals, reorganized democrats, anti-corporation republicans-the stumbling blocks erected by reactionaries, chief among whom are the small capitalist, the peanut merchant, the fellow with nis name on the door and a mortgage on his stock; he sighs for a business administration, he abuts his eyes and turns his back upon the laboring class, unconscious that in the inevitable development of industry the small competitor must give way and take a place in the crowded marts of wage-slaves.

The petty capitalist discovers that competition is not the life of trade: few lessons in the school of experience convinces him that the owner of the job is the boss, the master of the situation. Nothing is left but to join the army of discontent and fight for the industries controlled by the trusts. The more perfectly organized they are, the better the opportunity. A concern, for instance, like the Smelting Trust, socialized in every department, is ready to be benevolently assimilated” and its operation continued for the benefit of all the people.

The laborers who are working ten and twelve hours day for $1.60 will not object to a reduction in their hours of toil, nor will they refuse a full equivalent for the product of the death-dealing labor they perform. Ten million dollars in net profit was the dividend paid to stockholders by the Smelter Trust for the fiscal year just ended. Smelter stock has increased many fold. The stupendous amount in dividends, to which must be added extravagant salaries, campaign and philanthropic donations, is the difference of the wealth produced by the smelter workers and the amount they received as wages. Recently the American Smelting and Refining company-absorbed the United States Reduction and Refining company. another benevolent institution that watered its stock to the tune of $12.000,000 with sweat of its workmen. The manipulators of this concern added to their vast wealth by means of peculation conducted in the sampling department at the expense of the ore producer. The Colorado Fuel and Iron company is another establishment that is ready for benevolent intervention. It is a branch or feeder of the Standard Oil and the Amalgamated Copper company. Wages in the different departments of the steel works and coal mines of the C.F. & I. have been hammered down to the lowest notch. Seventy-eight cents per day is paid Japanese laborers, $1.40 for other foreign labor. It is safe to say that 60 per cent of the employes of this company have been imported in direct violation of the contract labor law, and to the immediate detriment of the state. Likewise, the Sugar Trust has got its tariff-protected sweet tooth nibbling at the vitals of the state and people.

A careful reading of the tropical philippics on the sugar industry emanating from two of Colorado a most eminent and learned statesmen leads me to believe that there is more in the sugar beet than their philosophy ever dreamed.

This allusion to the saccharine vegetable is merely suggestive of the possibilities of the sugar industry if controlled and operated collectively, and to afford opportunity to mention that sugar has deteriorated in quality and advanced one-third in price to Colorado consumers. Kansas City matrons can manufacture sugar-tits from the Colorado product cheaper than can their Denver sisters: which fact, to say the least, augurs ill for a protected infant industry. It gives the further opportunity to say that an erudite discussion of an important industrial question involves the feature of prime importance to labor, that must not be overlooked. The Sugar industry as at present conducted in Colorado is a blight, a curse, a disgrace to the already corporation gangrened escutcheon of the state. The Sugar Trust dictates the price per ton for beets. The farmer, in search of profit, leases or contracts the acreage of his beet fields to the lowest bidder. with the result that the farming sections of the state are infested with the poorest of the working class–Russian serfs, Jap coolies. Mexican peons. Navajo Indians. The entire family—father, mother, Sister Ann and her brothers and sisters work in the fields. Probably not more than ten per cent of the beet field hands are voters. I submit that Colorado is paying a terrible price, in the degradation she suffers, for the financial success of a few individuals who have corralled the manufacture of a commodity a thousandfold more essential to the whole people than any public utility, such as a street railway, can ever be.

The farmers have, as a matter of self-protection, been compelled to organize a Beet Raisers’ Union–this is not the name of the association, but it amounts to the same thing–as they combined for mutual interest and .o obtain for their beets a price better than that offered by the Trust. Five dollars per ton is paid to the land holders for beets this season. the actual producer-the Russ, Jap. Peon and Poor Logets but a miserable pittance for his back-breaking toil. A large per cent of the beet workers are contracted for by employment agencies and are shipped out of the state after the crop is harvested. With their scanty hoard they manage to eke out an existence in the tenement quarters of large cities, there to stifle and starve till planting time comes again.

In good old slavery days, after the cotton and tobacco were marketed, the master’s first attention was to provide for his field hands food, clothing, shelter, and medical attendance. The plantation owner or farmer of the Centennial (!) state provides none of these essentials. The niggardly wages scarce more than keep the family when at work. After the season’s labor is performed. the human cattle are turned loose to “root hog or die.” The southern farmer assumed the responsibility of caring for his chattel slaves. The up-to-date farmer now goes to the labor market and purchases his slaves for a day, a month or a year. The only responsibility he assumes is to pay wages for the period of servitude he requires. If the wage slave has not signed a bill of sale of himself or herself in the form of an indenture or contract, they have the right to change masters; but, a master they must have or starve.

The republican and democratic conventions and platforms speak in glowing terms of the sugar industry as commercial enterprise, with never a word or a thought of the misery attending the workers who make industry of all kinds possible. It were better for Colorado that never another beet be raised in her fertile fields if to be converted into sugar to make richer a few already rich at the expense of thousands miserably poor, degraded, with slanted brow.

The republican party has a trashified guardianship of the sugar. industry. To protect the captains interested. we are going to benevolently assimilate the island of Cuba and her inhabitants. The lone star of the Pearl of the Antilles flashed only as a meteor. The belligerent revolutionists who had the temerity to protest against a corrupt election will be made tractable and obedient under the wage system, governor generated by one of the president’s “Rough Riders.” In this brazen, bulldozing, bare-faced. buccaneering, the democratic party will quietly acquiesce, just as it has grabbed hold of its free-trade tariff tail and is swallowing itself on the question of duty on Philippine sugar. Tariff or no tariff, what boots it to the working class of Colorado: The laborers in the beet field are as cheap a class in comparison as either Cuban or Filipino, the cheapest obtainable labor being yearly imported to the beet fields to be exploited by land owner and Sugar Trust: and as a matter of good measure to the infant industry, the juvenile court of Denver and vicinity furnishes its quota of child labor.

This then is the enterprise so highly commended by republican and demo crat alike, and as vigorously condemned by the Socialist party, which sees in the growing industry splendid advantages and opportunities. but only when the factories and fields are brought under control of the working class and operated collectively for the benefit of all the people. This may flavor of confiscation, but it isn’t–it is sovereignty of the producers, the evolution of civilization, the program of Socialism that recognizes no identity of interest between the capitalist class and the working class.

The republican party is universally recognized as the political expression of the economic and industrial interest of organized and combined capital.

The democratic party is the erratic folly of a rapidly disintegrating middle class of exploiters, the cat’s-paw of concentrated wealth, the wail of a class that is being crushed and ground through the stamp-mill of evolution. As a party, democracy is a mill-stone of Jacksonian simplicity around the neck of Progress, a stumbling block in the pathway of genius, the Rip van Winkle of social thought. It has slept for seventy years. It belongs to a paradoxical era when a president of a free republic was the proud possessor of human slaves; when it required ten hours to make a ton of iron; when competition was the life of trade; when every manufacturer owned his own tools and made a finished product.

The democratic party is as much of a back number as a labor union without political expression of its economic strength. It can be independent in nothing. It is “anti” in everything. Advanced thought and crystalization of power have left is hopelessly stranded on the depopulated shores of individual effort, among the flotsam and jetsam of discarded and out-of-date tools and conditions. Like the spinning-wheel, the hand- press and the ox-team, superstition, witchcraft and competition. Jeffersonian democracy finds no place amid the splendid achievements of modern industrial development. Its epitaph is writ- ten-“Simplicity.” The fifty per cent corporation philosophy of the great commoner will not save the party of Belmont and Parker from political oblivion. The rich democrats who made their fortunes by republican methods and all of them have should get together, get into the party of the trusts, where they must eventually stand. and let the issue come where it belongs a struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, represented by the republican and Socialist parties, for the control and supervision of the machinery and means of production and distribution. The truth of the irresistible conflict was recognized by the late Mark Hanna, who predicted the next great political battle would be between the captains of industry and the industrial workers–the republicans and the Socialists.

The war of the classes is on. The state of Colorado is fighting on the skirmish line. The corporations have entrenched their forces behind the bulwarks of municipal, county, state and national governmental authority. Tactics the most vicious and depraved have been and are being resorted to. The political corporation cabal knows no law that capitalists are compelled to obey. With relentless fury traditions of the people have been ridden down roughshod. Methods the most corrupt and vile are used while shouting “Law and order!” Anarchy prevails in Colorado, and who is to blame? From the lips of every honest citizen comes the earnest cry, “The corporations, the republican party! And what the people say is true. majority of 45,000 of the voting pop Ince brought a verdict of “Guilty” against Peabody when he was tried at the bar of public judgment. This was the overwhelming result, notwithstanding the fact that it was a presidential election and that the martial law governor had the advantage of being on the same ticket with the electors of President Ruzvlt, who was then at the flood tide of popularity. Though Peabody was decisively beaten, the republican corporations, with the aid of democratic business allies, stole the election and the governorship. But this is not the only public office that has been stolen in Colorado. Wherever corporate greed has fastened its claws in industrial pursuits, there can be found evidence of the diabolical deeds of the cabal, until now it is not an exaggeration to say that ninety nine out of every hundred officials hold their offices through fraud. And the crying shame is that the people know this. There is a gleam of hope in the fact that the workers are not inured to the iniquity. but propose to erase the black pools of debauchery and degradation. the life-giving elements of tyrannical corporations. The class conscious workers have been quickened–not by the change of the governorship, as that was a matter of small moment, but by the brutal gouge and bite tactics used by the political corporations to accomplish their unlawful and unholy purpose. The corporations waged campaign of treachery, bribery, perjury and murder. These are fearful charges, but true; and there are yet fouler, blacker, baser crimes which neither they nor their emissaries can deny–the debauchery of the courts, the pollution of the ballot–perpetrated for the inhuman purpose of enriching the units and enslaving the thousands of the human family. Even now, while the commercial spirit is it rampant, those guilty of the monstrous crime of undermining the pillars of a free government are shunned as things unclean.

A lesser crime, perhaps, but one as far-reaching, was committed by the framers of the charter of the city and county of Denver, when with section XX, they disfranchised all who did not pay direct taxes. The city munificently pays its street and park employes $2 a day. Because they cannot provide for the family, purchase property and pay taxes on $12 a week, they are denied the right to vote, unless equipped with receipt and instructions by the utility corporations. The persons debarred from franchise pay the heaviest taxes; they are taxed to their full wage capacity for the right to live. The landlord from whom the wage earner rents, adds to his interest all taxes assessed against his property as a part of the rental, all of which are paid by the tenant. Who, then, pays the taxes? Who is best entitled to the right to vote?

It is through the injustice of such measures that the class who do the work of the world have become awakened to the necessity of controlling the machinery of labor and the wealth they produce. It is for this purpose the working class are organizing industrially and uniting politically. Capitalists will play no part in the game. system creates a surplus; this surplus is capital, the accumulation of toil, purloined by the privileged class who have enacted laws legalizing the crime of great-grand larceny. To the coupon- clipping, money-groveling class of capitalism, stealing governorships and all other offices. is political sagacity” filching franchises by means that would shame a decent highwayman is “business acumen; robbing the commonwealth of millions of acres of fruitful lands, is tactful acquisition”; embezzling the funds of the people’s exchequer through the national banking system, is “financial genius”; plundering the nation of its forests, oil, coal and mineral lands, its highways and waterways, is “shrewd commercial sense”; murdering thousands of coal miners by explosions caused by the heedless accumulation of dust and firedamp, through neglect of proper ventilation, is “unavoidable accident”; poisoning people by multitudes with adulterated meat, foodstuffs and drugs, is “commendable enterprise,” and will hereafter bear the label of your government’s approval. The frightful carnage of railroad wrecks, the capitalist invariably has charged to the incompetency of some employe, when, in truth, his insatiable greed has strained to the breaking point the endurance of his faithful wage-slave by over-work and long hours. This is “economy and discipline.”

Capitalism, in mockery, said, “Suffer little children to come unto me.” Millions of innocent babes have answered the call, and capitalism has crammed their helpless souls and bodies down the dirty, black, repulsive throats of the coal mines, down deep into the abysmal depths of despair. It has thrust the little ones into the gnawing, frothing jaws of the cotton mills and factories. there to have their tender bones and marrow ground into its “white bread.” their precious blood squeezed through the wine press of hell for the nectar of its cup. This is “prosperity”!

Capitalism has degraded the home with its iniquitous tenements and sweat-shops. It has lowered man and woman to the level of beasts of burden, harnessed them to its profit-making machine.

Capitalism is the growth of private monopoly of things collectively used. the republican party is political capitalism.

The Socialist party is political industrialism. Industrialism is to the producing class what capitalism is to the private monopolist.

The producing class objects to com- petition in the labor market. The capitalist class forbids competition in privileges and the marketable wages of labor. In vain the working class of Colorado have looked to republican and democratic parties to enforce the labor laws now on the statute books. The Socialist party will absolutely and with certainty enforce the eight-hour day, safety appliance, ventilation, check-weighman. bi-monthly pay day, anti-contract labor, truck store, child labor, eight-hour law! for females, and all labor laws that have been dead letters, mute and silent witnesses to the inefficacy of democratic and republican administration.

Moreover, the Socialist party is for all legislation that will advance the interests of the working class.

Mr. Bryan, democracy’s idol. said in a recent speech that “the republican party is responsible for the Socialism in this country today…The republican party’s theory and practice is that competition is a bad thing, and that the privileges of monopoly should be owned by the few. If the issues should finally come to the point of whether the monopolies should be owned by a few people to the detriment of the many, or by all the people for the benefit of all Socialism will triumph in this country as surely as daylight follows dark.” Mr. Bryan has shown the way to in ustifluvent and blighted the democratic party in one breath. The issue has finally come to the point! The monopolies shall be owned by all the people for the benefit of all! It is the triumph of Socialism!

The Appeal to Reason was among the most important and widely read left papers in the United States. With a weekly run of over 550,000 copies by 1910, it remains the largest socialist paper in US history. Founded by utopian socialist and Ruskin Colony leader Julius Wayland it was published privately in Girard, Kansas from 1895 until 1922. The paper came from the Midwestern populist tradition to become the leading national voice in support of the Socialist Party of America in 1901. A ‘popular’ paper, the Appeal was Eugene Debs main literary outlet and saw writings by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mary “Mother” Jones, Helen Keller and many others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/061103-appealtoreason-w570.pdf