Allan Shaw Haywood was an American coal miner and labor union leader. He served as a vice-president and chief organizer of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, subregional director of the Steel-workers Organizing Committee, chairman of the Utility Workers Organizing Committee, and president of the New York State Industrial Union Council.
Background
Allan Shaw Haywood was born on October 9, 1888 in Monk Bretton, Yorkshire, England. He was the son of Arthur and Ann Haywood. Nothing is known of his mother. At the age of thirteen he began working with his father in the coal pits and soon after he joined the British Miners' Federation.
Career
In 1906 Haywood immigrated to the United States to work in the coal fields of Witte and then Taylorville, Illinois. In the same year Haywood joined the United Mine Workers and became a professional organizer, rising in the UMW hierarchy to subdistrict vice-president and president and then serving as district representative on the national executive board.
In 1935 UMW president John L. Lewis challenged the old trade unionism and with other union leaders founded a Committee for Industrial Organization; this group changed its name to Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. A trusted Lewis subordinate, Haywood became involved with the CIO and its activities as a traveling consultant to newly emerging CIO unions.
For a year he advised the United Rubber Workers. In May 1937, Haywood became CIO regional director of New York City. He also served as subregional director of the Steel-workers Organizing Committee, chairman of the Utility Workers Organizing Committee, and president of the New York State Industrial Union Council. In 1939 Lewis appointed Haywood director of organization of the CIO, a title he held until his death. He also became a vice-president of the CIO in 1942, and in 1951 he was named executive vice-president.
By the end of the 1940s, Haywood's travels had made him the best-known man in the CIO in a personal sense. He was a chairman of the Telephone Workers Organizing Committee, which established the giant Communication Workers of America union. He also served as chairman of organizing committees for CIO unions of federal workers, paper workers, and railroad workers. He was a member of the advisory committee to the Council of National Defense, and during World War II he served on the labor advisory committee of the Office of Price Mobilization.
He appeared at all their union conventions, prowling the hotel corridors at midnight in search of problems to solve or Scotch to drink, and growling to smoke-filled rooms. " Despite his popularity--he was known as "Mr. CIO" to fellow union members--Haywood never became a public figure. Overshadowed on a national level by Lewis, Haywood had no secure base in an individual union. When Lewis left the CIO after his famous dispute with Philip Murray in 1942, Haywood remained loyal to Murray and the CIO.
By the early 1950s he was generally considered to be the CIO's hatchet man; his job was not so much day-to-day administration as it was, said one observer, "carrying the word" from headquarters. Even here his lack of education hampered him; his speeches were described as "long, rambling, formless" affairs.
In 1952, after Murray's death, Haywood emerged as the natural leader of the old bread-and-butter unionists in an unsuccessful challenge to Walter Reuther for the presidency of the CIO. Much was made of the differences between the two--Reuther, the intellectual with his theories of a socially and politically active union; Haywood, the battered old-line wage-and-working-condition unionist with pronounced anti-intellectualism. But the gulf was not that wide. Haywood's working-class experience in England gave his ideology a faint touch of democratic socialism and that separated him from other business union leaders.
He died on the road in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, collapsing at the microphone while addressing the local CIO council on brotherhood.
Achievements
Politics
Haywood represented the CIO abroad several times in the 1940s at international meetings of "free world" trade unionists, a reflection of his militant anticommunism.
Views
A colorful romantic, Haywood lived by the faith of trade unionism.
Personality
Haywood's popularity came from his warm, convivial personality, which came to the fore in small groups, and from his vast store of jokes and stories.
As Elise Morrow, a journalist, noted, the chunky, bulldog-like Haywood had "been both midwife and nursemaid to CIO unions.
Connections
On May 31, 1909, Haywood married Kate Dewsnap; they had three children.