The most important strike of the Western Federation of Miners, however, began in 1903 at Colorado City, where the mill and smeltermen’s union quit work in order to compel better working conditions.  As the sympathetic strike was a recognized part of the policy of the Western Federation of Miners, all the miners in the Cripple Creek region were called out.  The eight-hour day in the smelters was the chief issue.  In 1899 the Colorado legislature had passed an eight-hour law which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the State.  To overcome this difficulty, an amendment to the State constitution was passed in 1902 by a large majority, but the legislature, after having thus received a direct command to establish the eight-hour law, adjourned without taking action.  Much of the subsequent disorder and bloodshed in the Cripple Creek region during 1903-1904 is traceable to this failure on the part of the legislature to enact the eight-hour law.  The struggle in Colorado helped to convince the Western miners that agreements with their employers were futile, that constitutional amendments and politics were futile, and from this they drew the conclusion that the revolutionary way was the only way.  William D. Haywood, who became the central figure in the revolutionary movement of the Industrial Workers of the World since its launching in 1905, was a former national officer of the Western Federation of Miners and a graduate of the Colorado school of industrial experience.[79]

Even before 1905 the Western Federation of Miners, which was out of touch with the American Federation of Labor for reasons of geography and of difference in policy and program, attempted to set up a national labor federation which would reflect its spirit.  An American Labor Union was created in 1902, which by 1905 had a membership of about 16,000 besides the 27,000 of the miners’ federation.  It was thus the precursor of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.  In the latter the revolutionary miners from the West joined hands with radical socialists from the East and Middle West of both socialist parties, the Socialist party of America and DeLeon’s Socialist Labor party.

We shall forbear tracing here the complicated internal history of the I.W.W., that is the friction which immediately arose between the DeLeonites and the other socialists and later on the struggle between the socialists and the syndicalist-minded labor rebels from the West.  Suffice it to say that the Western Federation of Miners, which was its very heart and body, convinced of the futility of it all, seceded in 1907.  In 1911 it joined the American Federation of Labor and after several hard-fought strikes, notably in Michigan in 1913, it practically became assimilated to the other unions in the American Federation of Labor.