Big Bill Haywood: «The Terrible Bad Man of America with One Eye and a Great Big Black Hat,» Helen Campbell

On Monday, March 15, visitors will again be joined by the popular AMC lecturer, Helen Campbell. Helen Campbell is an American attorney and a Collegiate Professor for the University of Maryland University College-Europe in Heidelberg, Germany. During 2008-09, she taught in the Department of World Politics at Moscow State University pursuant to a Fulbright Teaching Grant. She has published two novels and is now working on a collection of essays, some of them about Russia. Her interest in American labor history grows out of her experiences growing up as the granddaughter of immigrant coal miners and steel workers from Ukraine. William "Big Bill" Haywood (1869-1929) was a prominent and radical figure in the American labor movement who founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later joined the American Communist Party. Throughout his career, he was hounded by captains of industry, Pinkerton detectives, police officers, and the American judiciary, which convicted him of espionage in 1918 and sentenced him to 20 years in federal prison. While free on appeal, he fled to Moscow and became a labor advisor to Lenin's Bolshevik government. He founded the Kuzbas Autonomous Industrial Colony in Siberia, importing skilled workers from America to assist Soviet citizens in mining coal