One
hundred and seven years ago on November 19, 1915 Utah authorities took Joe
Hill from his prison cell, tied
him to a straight back chair, blindfolded him and pinned a paper heart on his chest. Then, in accordance with the local custom a firing squad of five men, four of them with live rounds in their rifles and
one with a blank, perforated that paper valentine.
No
one was better at setting words to popular or sacred songs for use in educating
and rousing up workers than Joseph Hillstrom, a Swedish immigrant who drifted into the migratory labor life of the American West shortly after the dawn of the 20th Century. He was born as Joel
Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden and immigrated to the U.S. under
the name Hillstrom in 1902 learning English
in New York and staying for a while
in Cleveland, Ohio before drifting West.
He
joined the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) in 1910 and was soon
sending songs to IWW newspapers,
including his most famous composition,
The
Preacher and the Slave, meant to be sung to the music of the Salvation Army bands who were
frequently sent to street corners to
drown out Wobbly soapbox orators.
As
a footloose Wobbly Hill was likely
to blow into any Western town where
there was a strike or free speech fight. He was a big part of any Little Red Songbook from
1913 on with such contributions as The Tramp, There is Power in the Union,
Casey Jones the Union Scab, Scissor Bill, Mr. Block, and Where the River Frasier Flows. He
also began to compose original music as well, the most famous of which was The
Rebel Girl which he dedicated to the teen-age organizer of Eastern
mill girls, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Hill
also dispatched caustic, if crude, cartoons to Industrial Solidarity, the union’s newspaper,
some of which ended up on silent
agitators—stickers meant to
slapped up in mess halls, in lumber camps, in city flops and beaneries,
and even on the factory floor.
Joe
Hill was often the first fellow worker
ready to take the stump at a free
speech fight and the first arrested. He was loved by his fellow working stiffs and feared as an
enormous pain in the side of Western
bosses.
Hill
came to Salt Lake City where the
local copper barons feared he might
bring their miners out on strike. The
small IWW miner’s local there was a target of police harassment. But Hill
apparently had no specific plans and
was just booming around looking for
work and possibly a place to winter over
with sympathetic local Swedes.
After
he showed up at a doctor’s office with
a bullet wound, he was arrested and charged with the robbery
and murder of a grocer, a former policeman named
Morrison—and his son the night before. He told police that a woman’s honor was involved and would say no more. He was tried, convicted, and executed by
firing squad in 1915. He was just 36
years old.
Most scholars
agree that it was physically impossible for him to have been involved in
the robbery or to be shot by the grocer.
But questions always lingered about the bullet wound and that vague
alibi.
Finally
in 2013 writer William M. Adler did remarkable spade work and an exhaustive
investigation of Hill time in Salt Lake in his book The Man Who Never Died, The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe
Hill, American Labor Icon. Adler identified the likely real murder
of grocery store owner and his son as Magnus Olson, a career criminal with a long record who was known to be in the
area and who had beef with the former policeman. The police had even picked him up as a
possible suspect but he talked his way out of it and hid his identity
under a welter of aliases. Olson
also matched the physical description of the assailant given by
Morrison’s surviving son, which Hill did not.
Then Adler identified the mysterious woman—20 year old Hilda
Ericson, the daughter of the family which ran
the rooming house in suburban
Murray where he was staying. She had been engaged to Hill’s friend,
fellow Swede, and Fellow Worker Otto Applequist who also boarded
at the house. Joe won the
girl’s heart and she threw over Applequist for the Wobbly bard. An upset Applequist shot Hill in a fit of
jealousy, but immediately regretted it and was the man who took Joe
to the doctor for treatment. After
taking Hill back to the rooming house he packed his bag and left
at 2 am with the excuse he had gone looking for work. Hill refused to name Applequist out of loyalty
to his friend, and refused to identify the girl to spare her public
humiliation—or perhaps to spare her and her family the risk of
persecution from the police for providing an alibi. And despite all that it cost him, Hill
refused to say more.
The
judgment of history is that Joe Hill
was framed. He became a martyr to labor in no small measure because of his Last
Words, a letter to IWW General Secretary Treasurer William D. “Big
Bill” Haywood,
Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue
rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have
my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in
Utah.
That
has been shortened as a union motto
to “Don’t Mourn Organize.
He
also composed a memorable Last Will:
My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan,
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Oh, if I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow,
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my Last and final Will.
Good Luck to All of you,
Joe Hill.
In keeping with Hill’s wishes his body was shipped by rail to Chicago, home of the IWW’s General Headquarters where it was
cremated. His funeral
was attended by thousands at the Westside
Auditorium on Thanksgiving Day
where Haywood, spoke along with tributes
in several other languages and
performances of Hill’s songs. The funeral possession was reportedly one of the largest ever held in Chicago
up to that time. It took Hill’s remains
to Waldheim Cemetery—now known as Forest Home Cemetery—where the bulk of his ashes were scattered
around the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.
The rest of his ashes were divided
into small manila envelopes which
were sent to IWW locals or delegates in all 48 states except Utah as well as to Sweden, and other
countries.
Over the years some packets of Hill’s ashes have surfaced—some that were seized
by the Federal Government in its
1917 nationwide raids on IWW halls
and offices were returned to the union by the National Archives in 1988. The packets have been disposed of in various ways, some ceremonial, some not. British labor singer Billy Bragg reportedly ate some. West coast Wobbly singer Mark Ross has some inside his guitar. Former Industrial
Worker editor Carlos Cortez scattered ashes at the dedication
of a monument to the six striking coal miners killed by Colorado State Police machine gun fire
in the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre. An urn
kept at General Headquarters in Chicago contains his last known ashes.
Hill entered American culture as a folk hero along with the likes of John Henry and Casey Jones largely thanks to the memorable 1936 song I
Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night with lyrics by Alfred Hayes and
music by Earl Robinson. As performed and recorded by the great African-American
actor, activist, and singer Paul
Robeson it became an anthem of
the labor movement and eventually more famous than Hill’s own songs. More than three decades later Joan Baez introduced it to a new
generation of radicals and activists when she sang it at the Woodstock Festival in 1989.
Phil Ochs, one
of the heirs of Hill’s protest bard legacy also wrote and
recorded his own Ballad of Joe Hill complete
with a detailed account of his fate.
Hill is also a revered figure in his native Sweden
where he has been commemorated on postage stamps and where his childhood home is reverently preserved as a museum. In 1971 director Bo Widerberg came to the States to film his Joe Hill. Despite his reputation as the lyrical auteur
of the internationally acclaimed Elvira Madigan, Widerberg botched the job by sacrificing much
of the gritty class war content for a sappy
and unbelievable romance. The film sank like a stone when
released in English in the U.S.
But even a bad movie could not erode Hill’s
fame. He has appeared in fiction, poetry, and plays and has inspired several works of art, perhaps most notably in linocut posters hand produced by Wobbly artist, poet, and editor Carlos Cortez.
For the centennial of Hill’s execution events
were held around the country and the world all year, including a series of Joe Hill Road Show tours featuring
contemporary IWW musicians and other
performers of people’s
music.
Truly, Joe Hill is the Man Who Never Died.
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