Bill Haywood

William Dudley Haywood , better known as Big Bill Haywood, was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

William D. Haywood was born in 1869 in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory. His father, a Pony Express rider, died of pneumonia when Haywood was three years old. His maternal grandfather was an Afrikaner born in the Orange Free State in 1820. At age nine, he injured his right eye while whittling a slingshot with a knife, permanently blinding his right eye. Haywood never had his damaged eye replaced with a glass eye when photographed, he would turn his head to show his left profile. That same year, he began working in the mines, never having received much formal education. After brief stints as a cowboy and a homesteader, he returned to mining in 1896. Highprofile events such as the gradual demise of the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 and the Pullman Strike in 1894 fostered Haywoods interest in the labor movement.

Source: Wikipedia