Haywood remained in exile for the last seven years of his life. Once settled in Russia, his naïve vision of a workers’ utopia gave way as he observed the stark reality of the new Soviet dictatorship. He died utterly disillusioned, but the Soviets gave him a hero’s funeral, keeping half of his ashes in the Kremlin. They honored his request to have the remainder sent back to Chicago to be buried near the Haymarket Square martyrs who had inspired his lifelong battle for worker rights.
Pulitzer Prize winner J. Anthony Lukas’s epic history, Big Trouble, retells Haywood’s story and its context. Lukas notes the ironic difference in outcome of Haywood’s trial on charges he conspired to assassinate Governor Steunenberg from that of the accidental deaths caused by the McNamara brothers’ sabotage. Several Socialist journalists close to both the WFM leadership and the militant Ironworkers Union privately shared the view in the fall of 1911 that the main difference between the two political crimes was that the two brothers got caught red-handed.
A reporter who covered the McNamara trial for Appeal to Reason wrote his publisher that “The McNamara brothers are not one bit more guilty of the crime charged against them than were Myer, Haywood and Pettibone . . . Trickery and audacity liberated the miners’ officials.” But the Appeal to Reason refrained from publishing that story because of what it might do to the Socialist cause: to reveal the truth “would disgust hundreds of thousands of people” with their movement.46 The rallying cry of innocence in each instance was a propaganda war fought against ruthless political adversaries. Neither the prosecutors nor the defense respected the law. These two high-stakes trials were merely cynical games in a deadly class struggle for power in which media on both sides were often complicit.
Ironically, at the same time Roosevelt had been applying heavy pressure in 1906 on the Supreme Court to let the constitutionally questionable Idaho trials go forward against three “undesirable citizens,” the president was waging an unprecedented battle in the South for respect for the Supreme Court’s authority. Just a month after the WFM leaders were kidnapped by Pinkerton agents, a lynch mob broke a black federal prisoner out of jail and hanged him to prevent Supreme Court review of his rape conviction. With President Roosevelt’s full support, what followed was the one and only contempt trial the United States Supreme Court ever conducted – one which would have lasting consequences for the criminal justice system of every state in the union.
4. SHOWDOWN WITH THE SUPREME COURT
The Lynching That Gave Teeth to the Fourteenth Amendment Right to a Fair Trial
“To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now.”
– NOTE PINNED TO ED JOHNSON’S CORPSE1
During Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, novelist and playwright Thomas Dixon was the nation’s most popular lecturer. In the age before radio, Dixon spoke to sold-out audiences across the country, waxing poetic on racial purity, the evils of Socialism and the proper role of women – at home raising children. Belittling bi-racial intellectuals like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, Dixon repeatedly warned his audiences that Negroes were a race of savages: “[No] amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious, can make a Negro a white man or bridge the chasm of centuries which separate him from the white man in the evolution of human nature.”2 (Dixon’s anger may have been fueled by abhorrence of his own half-brother, the son of Dixon’s father and the family cook.)3
The national fad since the late 19th century was to gather round the piano and sing “coon” songs. The public could not get enough of comic sheet music that portrayed Negro men as loose-living, watermelon-eating, ignorant buffoons; ridiculed them as lazy, shiftless gamblers and hustlers or drunks, or demonized them as razor-wielding street bullies. White women singers in black face gained followings as “coon shouters.” Hundreds more coon songs fed an insatiable public appetite that lasted through the turn of the century. Historian Eric Foner notes, “By the early 20th century [racism] had become more deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our nation’s entire history.”4
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dixon_Jr.
During Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, novelist and playwright Thomas Dixon was the nation’s most popular lecturer. In the age before radio, Dixon spoke to sold-out audiences across the country, waxing poetic on racial purity, the evils of Socialism, and the proper role of women -- at home raising children. Dixon repeatedly warned his audiences that Negroes were a race of savages: “[No] amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious, can make a Negro a white man or bridge the chasm of centuries which separate him from the white man in the evolution of human nature.” Dixon’s anger may have been fueled by abhorrence of his own half-brother, the son of Dixon’s father and the family cook.
Source of book cover and movie poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clansman: A_Historical_Romance_of_the_Ku_Klux_Klan
Dixon published The Clansman in 1906 in homage to the Ku Klux Clan; it became the basis for the nation’s first blockbuster movie in 1915, The Birth of a Nation.
In 1905, one out of six American households bought the sheet music for “If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon.”5 That same year Dixon published the best seller The Clansman. A decade later it would be turned into the blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation. In a key scene, Dixon reenacted the most frightening moment of his childhood. A Confederate widow got his father and his uncle, who headed the local Klan, to don their white robes and hoods and join other Klansmen in stringing up a former slave accused of attacking the woman’s daughter. The Ku Klux Klan hanged the man in the center of town and shot him repeatedly for good measure. Dixon’s mother reassured her young son, “They’re our people – they’re guarding us from harm.”6
Among those who enjoyed putting on black face to ridicule former slaves were members of the white supremacist Pickwick Club, who paraded annually at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Since 1874, many of their members also belonged to the Louisiana White League, formed by Confederate Army veterans to oppose Reconstruction by acts of violence and intimidation. The White League was similar to the secretive KKK, but had enough local support to operate openly without hoods. Members of the Pickwick Club and White League joined with other Democrats in passing Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Train Act, which required railroad companies to isolate African-American travelers. Eighteen local black activists reacted by forming a Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. The test case they set in motion would have enormous repercussions for more than half a century.
The New Orleans citizens’ committee asked a volunteer named Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black, to buy a first-class ticket to ride in a car designated “whites only.” The committee prearranged with the railroad’s management to have Plessy arrested for civil disobedience when he declined to move out of that car. The citizens’ committee then paid for Plessy’s legal challenge of the $25 fine, expecting