Joe Hill (activist)

Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, and also known as Joseph Hillström (October 7, 1879 – November 19, 1915) was a Swedish-American labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. He was executed for murder after a controversial trial, and after his death became the subject of a folksong.

Early life and I.W.W. activity

Hill was born in Gävle, a town in the province of Gästrikland, Sweden. He emigrated to the United States in 1902, where he became a migrant laborer, moving from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, and eventually to the West Coast. He was in San Francisco, California, at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Hill joined the Wobblies around 1910, when he was working on the docks in San Pedro, California. In late 1910 he wrote a letter to the I.W.W. newspaper, Industrial Worker, identifying himself as a member of the Portland, Oregon I.W.W. local.

Hill rose in the I.W.W. organization and travelled widely organizing workers under the I.W.W. banner, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky" which appeared in his song "The Preacher and the Slave" (a parody of the then well known hymn "In the Sweet Bye and Bye"):

Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;

But when asked how 'bout something to eat

They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray,

Live on hay,

You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

Trial and execution

On January 10, 1914, John G. Morrison and his son Arling were killed in Salt Lake City by two armed men masked by red bandannas. Arling had drawn a revolver from the groceries and wounded one of the masked men before being killed. The police first thought it was a crime of revenge, for nothing had been stolen. On the same evening, Joe Hill appeared on the doorsteps of a local doctor with a bullet wound. Hill said that he had been wounded defending a woman. The doctor noticed that Hill was armed with a pistol.

Hill was arrested for Morrison's death. Morrison had once been a police officer, and several men he had arrested were at first considered suspects, but they were not pursued.

A red bandanna was found in Hill's rooms. The pistol Hill had when he was at the doctor was not found. Hill resolutely denied that he was involved in the robbery and killing of Morrison, but he refused to testify at his trial, and was convicted of murder. An appeal to the Utah Supreme Court was unsuccessful, and it is uncertain whether appeals for mercy organized by the I.W.W. did his case any good.

The case generated international attention, and critics charged that the trial and conviction were unfair. Much later the state of Utah declared that under their law today, Joe Hill would not have been executed based on the evidence presented at his trial.

Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915. Just prior to his execution, he had written to Bill Haywood, an I.W.W. leader, saying "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."^[1]

His will, which was eventually set to music by Ethel Raim, read:

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? Ah, 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

Hill's body was sent to Chicago where it was cremated. This was fitting as he had joked that he would not be caught dead in Utah. His ashes were purportedly sent to every I. W. W. local. In 1988 it was discovered that one envelope had been seized by the U. S. Postal Service in 1917 because of its "subversive potential." The envelope, with a photo affixed captioned: "Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915," as well as its contents, was deposited at the National Archives. After some negotiations, the last of Hill's ashes (but not the envelope that contained them) was turned over to the I. W. W. in 1988. The weekly In These Times ran notice of the ashes and invited readers to make suggestions as to what should be done with them. Suggestions varied from enshrining them at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington DC to Abbie Hoffman's suggestion that they be eaten by today's "Joe Hills" like Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked. Bragg indeed did swallow a small bit of the ashes and still carries Shocked's share for eventual completion of Hoffman's last prank.[1] The majority were once again cast to the wind in the US, Canada, Sweden, Australia and Nicaragua. The ash sent to Sweden was only partly cast to the wind. The main part was interred in the wall of a union office in Landskrona, a minor city in the south of the country, with a plaque commemorating him. That room is now the reading room of the local city library.

Labor Perspective

The following biography of Joe Hill is reprinted from an American Postal Workers Union local newspaper, circa 2000, and is drawn largely from the biography on the AFl-CIO website at Joe Hill Biography. This material is in no way copyrighted, and is reproduced here at the express request of its author.

Author’s note: This biography includes seven of the thirty-two songs whose lyrics, and sometimes music, Joe Hill wrote. I’m sorry there wasn’t room for all of them. To see all of them, and even hear a few, try Hill's Songs.

In the fifty years before World War I, the labor movement in the United States coalesced around the mythic figures that populated those days – folks like Uriah Stephens and Terence Powderly, John Mitchell and Big Bill Haywood, Alec Campbell and Jack Kehough, Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Samuel Gompers was the soul of nascent American unionism; Eugene V Debs was its conscience. And Joe Hill was its voice.

Like so many of the down-trodden wage slaves he sought to empower, he was an immigrant. Born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund, he became Joseph Hillstrom upon arriving in the promised land at 22. By the time he became the poet-balladeer of working folks, he was just Joe Hill. The simplicity suited both the man and his calling.

CASEY JONES - THE UNION SCAB (to tune of Casey Jones)

The Workers on the SP line to strike sent out a call;

But Casey Jones, the engineer, he wouldn't strike at all;

His boiler it was leaking, and its drivers on the bum,

And his engine and its bearings, they were all out of plumb.

Casey Jones kept his junk pile running;

Casey Jones was working double time;

Casey Jones got a wooden medal,

For being good and faithful on the SP line.

The workers said to Casey: “Won't you help us win this strike?”

But Casey said: “Let me alone, you'd better take a hike.”

Then some one put a bunch of railroad ties across the track,

And Casey hit the river bottom with an awful crack.

Casey Jones hit the river bottom;

Casey Jones broke his blessed spine;

Casey Jones was an Angelino,

He took a trip to heaven on the SP line.

When Casey Jones got up to heaven, to the Pearly Gate,

He said: “I'm Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the SP freight.”

“You're just the man,” said Peter, “our musicians went on strike;

You can get a job a’scabbing any time you like.”

Casey Jones got up to heaven;

Casey Jones was doing mighty fine;

Casey Jones went scabbing on the angels,

Just like he did to workers of the SP line.

They got together, and they said it wasn't fair,

For Casey Jones to go around a’scabbing everywhere.

The Angels' Union Nº 23, they sure were there,

And they promptly fired Casey down the Golden Stairs.

Casey Jones went to Hell a’flying;

“Casey Jones,” the Devil said, “Oh fine:

Casey Jones, get busy shoveling sulphur;

That's what you get for scabbing on the SP Line.”

(Joe Hill wrote this parody of the popular folksong in 1912, based on a year-old strike involving 35,000 shopmen of the Harriman and [Illinois Central Railroad System], which included the SP – Southern Pacific. The strike ultimately lasted until 1915. Casey Jones – The Union Scab was first published in the July 11, 1912 edition of the IWW Little Red Songbook.)

Joe came into this world in Gavle, a Swedish city of about 40,000 a hundred miles north of Stockholm. He was born on October 7, 1879, one of six children in a working class family. His father, Olof, died when he was eight. When his mom died in 1902, he and his older brother Paul emigrated to the United States.

Like so many of the world’s poor and idealistic, Joe was lured by America’s fabled opportunities and legendary social justice. Like so many other immigrants, he came to New York City through Ellis Island and anglicized his name to better fit in among the common folk who ruled here as nowhere else.

Like all the rest, he soon found that the fables and legends were just that.

Settling in the Bowery, he found immigrants discriminated against, exploited and forced into their own little ghettos, no matter how WASPy their new names sounded. And common laborers were just another disposable commodity, to be used until worn out and then replaced with a new one.

There were no hereditary kings and nobles to bow down to here. But the fiduciary princes owned or controlled everything – the railroads, mines, newspapers and politicians.

At least royalty saw their position as a secure birthright. The robber barons gouged and clawed their way to the top, and damn well intended to stay there by the same means.

Moreover, by the late nineteenth century, most hereditary nobility believed in the principle of noblesse oblige – a ruler’s duty to protect his subjects and act for their general welfare. Far from any notion of a social contract, the moneymen were often social darwinists, believing that they possessed power and wealth because they were the fittest to do so – and fitness was its own justification for wielding power and wealth to bring them yet more power and wealth.

As economist John Maynard Keynes noted “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

It was a time before unions had changed our society and laws – before pensions or forty-hour weeks or benefits or termination for cause or arbitration.

One man could invest a tiny fraction of his assets in a railroad or mine and realize fabulous riches and complete ownership of all of it, conveyable to his heirs – while another gave his working life for little more than food and shelter, and that only as long as he was able to work.

THE OLD TOILER’S MESSAGE (to the tune of Silver Threads Among the Gold, ©Hart Pease Danks, 1872)

“Darling I am growing old” –

So the toiler told his wife –

“Father Time the days have tolled

Of my usefulness in life.

Just tonight my master told me

He can't use me any more.

Oh, my darling, do not scold me,

When the wolf comes to our door.”

To the scrap heap we are going

When we're overworked and old –

When our weary heads are showing

Silver threads among the gold.

“Darling, I am growing old” –

He once more his wife did tell –

“All my labor pow’r I've sold

I have nothing more to sell.

Though I'm dying from starvation

I shall shout with all my might

To the coming generation.

I shall shout with all my might –”

DOWN IN THE OLD DARK MILL (to the tune of Down By the Old Mill Stream ©Tell Taylor)

How well I do remember

That mill along the way,

Where she and I were working

For fifty cents a day.

She was my little sweetheart;

I met her in the mill –

It’s a long time since I saw her.

But I love her still.

Down in the Old Black Mill,

That's where first we met.

Oh! that loving thrill

I shall ne’er forget;

And those dreamy eyes,

Blue like summer skies.

She was fifteen –

My pretty queen –

In the Old Black Mill.

We had agreed to marry

When she’d be sweet sixteen.

But then one day I crushed it –

My arm in the machine.

I lost my job forever –

I am a tramp disgraced.

My sweetheart still is slaving

In the same old place.

(Joe understood the plight of workers disabled by injury or age, whose life of productive toil now counted for nothing. The Old Toiler's Message and Down in the Old Dark Mill appeared in the August 21, 1913 edition of the Little Red Songbook.)

Within a couple of years, Joe quit New York to take up the life of an itinerant laborer, working whatever jobs he could find as he roamed his new country from New York to Hawaii. He sent cards to his sisters in Sweden from every stop. From [San Francisco], he sent the Gavle newspaper an eyewitness account of the great earthquake.

He learned the skills of the longshoreman, miner and lumberjack – and the [hobo]’s knack for hopping freight trains and living off the land. He also learned the fate of troublemakers in American industry – being fired from at least one job for trying to organize his fellow workers.

He was searching for that Great American Dream that he hoped was out there somewhere – a promised land of fair wages, decent working conditions and recognition of the investment that a worker’s labor constituted.

In 1910, he found the dream, or at least the means to it. The [Industrial Workers of the World], popularly known as the [Wobblies] (although that name wasn’t at all popular with the Wobblies).

The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905 by representatives of unions from forty different trades, most notably the Western Federation of Miners, The American Labor Union and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. The Wobblies believed in the class struggle between capital and labor described by Marx and Engels. They aimed to organize every worker in the world in one big union. They were syndicalists – believing union membership would grow until it reached a critical mass, at which point a global strike would bring down capitalism and replace it with industrial democracy.

Joe Hill joined the IWW in San Pedro, California. How better to find the dream then by helping create it.

And he found he could indeed help. The Wobblies used music to attract workers to street-corner rallies, and songs to put across their propaganda. It made sense: speech-making was one-man-at-a-time work, but a whole picket line could sing a song. Or, as Joe put it “a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.”

Joe had a natural gift for poetry and satire. And, as one IWW member put it, “Joe understands our troubles, because he has had to sleep in barns and haystacks, and those who have never had to live such a life can never understand.”

Joe put his talents to work writing songs to lampoon labor’s enemies, dramatize laborer’s plights, and, most of all, to call workers to join the means of their salvation.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, AWAKEN! (Words and music by Joe Hill)

Workers of the world, awaken!

Break your chains. demand your rights.

All the wealth you make is taken

By exploiting parasites.

Shall you kneel in deep submission

From your cradles to your graves?

ls the height of your ambition

To be good and willing slaves?

Chorus:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Fight for your own emancipation;

Arise, ye slaves of every nation.

In One Union grand.

Our little ones for bread are crying,

And millions are from hunger dying;

The end the means is justifying,

’Tis the final stand.

If the workers take a notion,

They can stop all speeding trains;

Every ship upon the ocean

They can tie with mighty chains.

Every wheel in the creation,

Every mine and every mill,

Fleets and armies of the nation,

Will at their command stand still.

Join the union, fellow workers,

Men and women, side by side;

We will crush the greedy shirkers

Like a sweeping, surging tide;

For united we are standing,

But divided we will fall;

Let this be our understanding –

“All for one and one for all.'“

Workers of the world, awaken!

Rise in all your splendid might;

Take the wealth that you are making,

It belongs to you by right.

No one will for bread be crying,

We'll have freedom, love and health.

When the grand red flag is flying

In the Workers' Commonwealth.

(Written in 1914, this anthem was published in the March 1916 Joe Hill Memorial Edition of the IWW Little Red Songbook.)

The Wobbly gospel was spread by organizers – proletarian missionaries who worked, from inside and out, to sign up the employees in a company or industry. All manner of direct action was used: strikes, boycotts, propaganda – and the occasional industrial sabotage.

This was war, after all, and the line between fair and foul was less important than the one between winning and losing. If it took a few “accidents” to open an employer’s eyes, that was a fair price. God knows enough workers were maimed or killed every year by unsafe equipment and conditions that the boss tolerated – or even encouraged – for the sake of greater profits.

Of course, the Wobblies didn’t call it sabotage, but “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency”. As they practiced it, it was a relatively subtle idea, not a revolutionary call to dynamite factories.

As Gibbs M Smith put it in Joe Hill Labor Martyr, the principle “was not a mandate for violence, but rather for a sprinkling of sand in the workings of a machine – mysteriously broken bands around bundles of shingles, or, perhaps, as Hill illustrated in Ta-ra-ra Boom De-Ay, a slight slip at the right time.

TA-RA-RA BOOM DE-AY (tune by Henry J Sayers, 1891)

I had a job once threshing wheat,

worked sixteen hours with hands and feet.

And when the moon was shining bright,

they kept me working all the night.

One moonlight night, I hate to tell,

I “accidentally'” slipped and fell.

My pitchfork went right in between

some cog wheels of that thresh-machine.

Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay!

It made a noise that way.

And wheels and bolts and hay,

Went flying every way.

That stingy rube said, "Well!

A thousand gone to hell.

But I did sleep that night,

I needed it all right.

Next day that stingy rube did say,

“I'll bring my eggs to town today;

You grease my wagon up, you mutt,

and don't forget to screw the nut.

I greased his wagon all right,

but I plumb forgot to screw the nut,

And when he started on that trip,

the wheel slipped off and broke his hip.

Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay!

It made a noise that way,

That rube was sure a sight,

And mad enough to fight;

His whiskers and his legs

Were full of scrambled eggs;

I told him, "That's too bad --

I'm feeling very sad.

And then that farmer said, "You turk!

I bet you are an I-Won't-Work.

He paid me off right there, By Gum!

So I went home and told my chum.

Next day when threshing did commence,

my chum was Johnny on the fence;

And 'pon my word, that awkward kid,

he dropped his pitchfork, like I did.

Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay!

It made a noise that way,

And part of that machine

Hit Reuben on the bean.

He cried “Oh me, oh my;

I nearly lost my eye.”

My partner said, “You're right –

It's bedtime now, good night.”

But still that rube was pretty wise,

these things did open up his eyes.

He said, “There must be something wrong;

I think I work my men too long.”

He cut the hours and raised the pay,

gave ham and eggs for every day,

Now gets his men from union hall,

and has no "accidents" at all.

Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay!

That rube is feeling gay;

He learned his lesson quick,

Just through a simple trick.

For fixing rotten jobs

And fixing greedy slobs,

This is the only way,

Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay!

(Published in the 1916 Joe Hill Memorial Edition of the IWW Little Red Songbook.)

Joe also had the vision to see that “worker” was a genderless word. He understood that it was just plain wrong for unions to ignore half the human race. He also saw that not enlisting women workers in the battle for social justice and economic equality was a tactical error the [labor movement] could ill afford.

As he put it in a letter to the IWW periodical Solidarity “The female workers are sadly neglected in the United States, especially on the West coast, and consequently we have created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union, and our dances and blowouts are kind of stale and unnatural on account of being too much of a ‘buck’ affair; they are too lacking the life and inspiration which the woman alone can produce.”

Joe began corresponding with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW’s most effective women organizer. Although they met face-to-face only once (in his jail cell in 1914), she had a profound influence on him.

THE REBEL GIRL (words and music by Joe Hill)

There are women of many descriptions

In this queer world, as everyone knows.

Some are living in beautiful mansions,

And are wearing the finest of clothes.

There are blue blooded queens and princesses,

Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl;

But the only and thoroughbred lady

Is the Rebel Girl.

That's the Rebel Girl, that's the Rebel Girl!

To the working class she's a precious pearl.

She brings courage, pride and joy

To the fighting Rebel Boy.

We've had girls before, but we need some more

In the Industrial Workers of the World.

For it's great to fight for freedom

With a Rebel Girl.

Yes, her hands may be hardened from labor,

And her dress may not be very fine;

But a heart in her bosom is beating

That is true to her class and her kind.

And the grafters in terror are trembling

When her spite and defiance she'll hurl;

For the only and thoroughbred lady

Is the Rebel Girl.

(Dedicated to IWW women, and published in the March 1916 Joe Hill Memorial Edition of the Little Red Songbook.)

Joe’s songs made a difference. In the [[Lawrence, [Massachusetts textile strike of 1912]], the mostly immigrant unskilled laborers spoke forty-four different languages. When the AFL skilled workers settled for a pissant raise and returned to work, it was the IWW who unified the disparate groups of common laborers – winning their most stunning victory. And it was Joe’s lyrics that they memorized and sang on the picket lines and at rallies – that truly made from many, one.

The war to organize all workers included battles on secondary fronts. One of the most common was campaigns for free speech, without which the organizers could be jailed as soon as they began to preach their syndicalism – or “criminal syndicalism” – as state and local laws often called it.

In 1912, Joe was a principle in a [free speech] war in San Diego. Stopped by anti-radical vigilantes, he and other Wobblies were forced at gunpoint to sing the Star-Spangled Banner while kissing a flag, among other penances.

Around this time, Joe may have participated in a less figurative war. There is some evidence that he briefly rode with Mexican rebels in the Baja. He wrote to Solidarity of the need for armed force in their insurrection, saying “Workers may find out that the only ‘machine’ worth while is the one which the capitalists use on us when we ask for more bread for ourselves and our families. The one that works with a trigger. All aboard for Mexico.”

In 1913, Joe went to [Utah] and got a job in the [Park City] mines about twenty-five miles from [Salt Lake City]. A free speech battle was brewing, as well as a drive to organize the copper miners there. Joe wasn’t a leader in either fight. He spent his time writing songs and getting to know people in the Swedish community of Murray, just south of Salt Lake.

On January 10, 1914, two men with kerchiefs over their faces walked into the Salt Lake City store owned by John A Morrison. They shot Morrison and his son Arling dead. Before Arling Morrison fell, he managed to reach a pistol kept under the counter and put a bullet in one fleeing assailant. Nothing was stolen from the store. Morrison was an ex-cop who’d often voiced fears of being targeted for revenge, so the police suspected a political motive.

They searched for anyone with a bullet wound, and found several such suspects. Because of the possibility that this was the work of a political assassin, they looked at anyone hostile to the authorities, which certainly included union organizers and free-speechers. That led them to Joe Hill’s room, where, three days after Morrison’s murder, Joe was sporting a recent bullet wound to the chest.

When they asked him how he got it, Joe told them he’d been in the middle of an intimate visit with a married lady friend, when her husband walked in and took it personal. They demanded her name. Joe said he’d already ruined her reputation with her husband, and he wasn’t about to ruin it with the rest of the community, or expose the husband to ridicule and her to his resulting vengeance. The cops took him in.

That was the sum total of their case: Joe was a radical agitator, was found with a bullet wound within walking distance of the crime scene, and wouldn’t give up the name of his alleged alibi. DA Leatherwood said Joe’s politics were motive enough, and his refusal to provide an alibi was proof he had none.

The DA had nothing but slim circumstantial evidence and lots of innuendo. Certainly, this wasn’t enough to sustain an indictment – even in Utah in 1915.

They indicted Joe. By June, they’d convicted him and sentenced him to execution by firing squad.

When Joe Hill fell into the laps of the copper bosses and their political lackeys, there was no way they were ever going to let him out alive. They could close an open murder, make John Morrison a martyr for “decent people”, and, best of all, get rid of that damn socialist Swede who wrote all that crap the radical anarchists were singing as they marched. It was a three-fer – literally a capitalist’s wet dream.

Once the trial ended, the war began. Labor leaders from all across the country mounted an assault on Governor William Spry. Some demanded a pardon, some a new trial, and some commutation to a life sentence; a few even demanded that Spry and Leatherwood be shot instead.

Sam Gompers, who Joe had lampooned in a song about the Lawrence strike, and “respectable” labor leaders also demanded Joe’s release. Spry, who considered all union men to be agitators, radicals and anarchists – at the very least – ignored them.

But the call came not just from labor leaders, but from common workers, too – decent folk, as it were. Virginia S Stephen, an instructor at Utah State University, and Sigrid Bolin, sister of the former Swedish consul, were so taken with Joe’s case that they sent a telegram to the Swedish Minister to the United States. In it, they pointed out that Joe was still a Swedish citizen, and, calling his sentence “a gross miscarriage of justice”, asked the Swedish government to get involved in the matter. (For her part in this, governor Spry and his administration so harassed Stephens that she finally quit her job at Utah State and moved to California, where she became a socialist activist.)

The Minister took up the cause, cabling King Gustav V about it. The King, assuming President Woodrow Wilson had powers equal to a monarch and could commute or overturn any sentence, asked him to do so as a personal favor. Wilson, possessed of no such power, implored Spry to pardon Hill or commute his sentence.

Spry was literally buried beneath a mountain of telegrams, but was still convinced Joe was guilty. He called a special meeting of the State Board of Pardons, and published notices demanding that anyone in possession of any concrete evidence show up with it. To Stephens and Bolin and other advocates within his jurisdiction, Spry sent [summons]es, saying in no uncertain terms that they’d show up at the hearing or the state troopers would fetch them.

Of course, the State Board found no reason to pardon Joe. Spry’s idea was to make his besiegers put up or shut up. He got neither. As expected, no one had any direct evidence to offer, but the telegrams and cables abated not one bit.

If he really was innocent, why would Joe Hill, who vowed from his cell “to win a new trial or die trying”, accept execution just to shield a paramour? It may simply be that he figured it wouldn’t do any good. to give her up. If a complete lack of direct evidence hadn’t deterred the authorities, why would an alibi corroborated by just one person – and Joe could hardly count on the husband to verify his whereabouts. Hell, Leatherwood would indict the lady as the second gunman.

But, more likely, it was just that Joe was a chivalrous romantic. When the cops searched his room after the arrest, they found lyrics and music to two songs that had nothing to do with unions or politics or workers. One was titled Oh, Please Let Me Dance this Waltz with You and the other was Come and Take a Joy-Ride in my Aeroplane.

A third song turned up on a handprinted index card – apparently once for sale – in the Joe Hill file of the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm in 1920. (Joe is a serious national hero back home in Sweden.)

DREAMLAND GIRL (Words and Music by Joe Hill)

Would you like to get acquainted with my Dreamland Girl divine?

Never was a picture painted fairer than this girl of mine.

Sweet and graceful like a pansy, bright and charming like a pearl,

She's the idol of my fancy, she's my own -- my Dreamland Girl.

Charming Fairy Queen of my dreams,

Ever before me your face brightly beams:

Night and day I’m dreaming of you,

Some day my sweet dreams perhaps will come true.

She is coy and captivating, Venus-like in grace and pose,

With an air more fascinating than the fragrance of the Rose.

Like the stars her eyes are shining 'neath a wealth of golden hair,

And my heart is ever pining for my Dreamland Girl so fair.

Was Joe guilty? He knew how to use a gun. And back then, every organizer had physical run-ins with goons, cops and vigilantes – just as every hobo sometimes scuffled with railroad bulls. Was it that big a stretch from fisticuffs and sabotage to assassination? Make no mistake, Joe Hill survived much of his life on his wits and guts – he was no naive innocent as many have portrayed him since. To view him as such is to deny much of his experience and his humanity.

Conservative icon Senator Orrin Hatch still agreed with Spry in 1980, saying “All the evidence, after all, is that Joe Hill actually was involved in killing John and Arling Morrison while robbing their grocery store.”

The cops and DA made only cursory investigations of the other suspects. They never found a second assailant, didn’t look much – never suggested anyone as Joe’s accomplice. Within ten years, the DA’s “evidence” had mysteriously disappeared from the courthouse, and Joe’s alibi woman came forward.

Plain and simple: Bill Spry and the State of Utah murdered Joe Hill. They marched him to an athletic field, set him in a chair against a stone wall, pinned a paper heart on his chest and shot him through it. And they did it because of who he was and what he thought, not because of anything he’d done.

Joe wrote lots of songs and letters in sixteen months on death row.

Dear Friend Gurley:

I have been saying Goodbye so much now that it is becoming monotonous but I just cannot help to send you a few more lines because you have been more to me than a fellow worker. You have been an inspiration and when I composed the Rebel Girl you was right there and helped me all the time. As you furnished the idea I will now that I am gone give you all the credit for that song, and be sure to locate a few more Rebel Girls like yourself, because they are needed and needed badly.... With a warm handshake across the continent and a last fond Goodbye to all I remain

Yours as Ever, Joe Hill

To [Ben Williams] (Solidarity Editor):

Tomorrow I expect to make a trip to the planet Mars and, if so, will immediately commence to organize the Mars canal workers into the IWW and we will sing the good old songs so loud that the learned star-gazers will once and for all get positive proof that the planet Mars is really inhabited …. I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better.

— Joe Hill

JOE HILL’S LAST WILL

My will is easy to decide,

For there is nothing to divide.

My kind don't need to fuss and moan -

“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Ah, 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

Joe telegraphed his last words to IWW Secretary William D (Big Bill) Haywood.

Goodbye Bill. I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning – organize! It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. 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.

— Joe Hill

On November 19, 1915 the capitalists killed Joe Hill. Or so they thought.

Joe lived much of his life like a vagabond poet and died like a rebel. Then began his second incarnation as the labor movement’s most enduring symbol.

The IWW claimed Joe’s body, and, in accordance with his last wishes, got it the hell out of Utah. They took Joe to Chicago for a funeral that he would have been proud of. It was attended by over thirty thousand mourners, with eulogies by every luminary in the labor movement – in nine different languages.

Joe’s body was cremated, and his ashes were divied up and parceled into over a hundred envelopes. The envelopes were then mailed to union locals in every state (except Utah), and to locals in Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. On an appointed day, every local scattered their share of Joe to the four winds. Both literally and figuratively, the whole wide world is Joe Hill’s resting place.

By 1920, the Wobblies were gone, done in by their opposition to World War I. But Joe Hill’s songs live on – translated into dozens of languages and sung at picket lines, rallies, protests, conventions, campfires – anywhere that working people strive together for a better life.

In 1915, Joe Hill became a martyr for radical unionism. By 1936, when the ballad of Joe Hill was written at Camp Unity, New York for a campfire program celebrating his songs, Joe was a bona fide legend.

Influence and tributes

Joe Hill is remembered for his devotion to union organizing and his many clever song lyrics, some of which continue to be sung.

Hill is also remembered from a tribute poem written about him in 1925 by Alfred Hayes entitled "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", although sometimes referred to simply as "Joe Hill". Hayes's lyrics were turned into a song in 1936 by Earl Robinson. The usual lyrics to the song go:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you and me.

Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"

"I never died" said he,

"I never died" said he.

"In Salt Lake, Joe," says I to him,

him standing by my bed,

"They framed you on a murder charge,"

Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,"

Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."

"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,

they shot you Joe" says I.

"Takes more than guns to kill a man"

Says Joe "I didn't die"

And standing there as big as life

and smiling with his eyes.

Says Joe "What they can never kill

went on to organize,

went on to organize"

From San Diego up to Maine,

in every mine and mill,

where working-men defend their rights,

it's there you find Joe Hill,

it's there you find Joe Hill!

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

alive as you and me.

Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"

"I never died" said he,

"I never died" said he.

Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger often performed this song and are associated with it, along with renowned Irish folk group The Dubliners. Their version, scored by Phil Coulter and sung by Luke Kelly, offers a stirring mix of Coulter's simple piano accompanient and Kelly's gravelly voice. Joan Baez's Woodstock performance of "Joe Hill" in 1969 is the most well-known recording.

Phil Ochs has also written and performed a song about Joe Hill, and in his turn was the subject of a rewritten version of the song by Billy Bragg.

The story of Joe Hill's execution served as the inspiration for the folk song "Long Black Veil," composed by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin. The song was first recorded by the bluegrass group The Country Gentlemen in 1960, and would go on to become a folk classic, recorded most notably Johnny Cash's on the album "At Folsom Prison" and by The Band on the seminal "Music From Big Pink," both in 1968. Inspired by speculation that Joe Hill's refusal to testify was to protect honor of a woman, the lyrics of the song are as follows:

 "Ten years ago, on a cold dark night
 Someone was killed, 'neath the town hall light
 There were few at the scene, but they all agreed
 That the slayer who ran, looked a lot like me

 The judge said son, what is your alibi,
 If you were somewhere else, then you won't haveto die,
 I spoke not a word, though it meant my life,
 For I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife.

Chorus
 She walks these hills in a long black veil,
 She visits my grave when the night winds wail,
 Nobody knows, nobody sees,
 Nobody knows but me.

 Oh, the scaffold is high and eternity's near,
 She stood in the crowd and shed not a tear,
 But late at night, when the north wind blows,
 In a long black veil, she cries over my bones."

Bob Dylan claims that Hill's story was one of his inspirations to begin writing his own songs.

The Swedish radical Socialist leader, Ture Nerman (1886 – 1969), wrote a biography about Joe Hill. Ture Nerman also translated most of Joe Hill's songs into Swedish.

Wallace Stegner published a fictional biography called Joe Hill in 1969.

He was also depicted in the 1971 movie Joe Hill, directed by Bo Widerberg. [2]

The Swedish hardcore band Refused named their LP from 1996 Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent after his song and textbook, published 1909 by the I.W.W.

Notes

^ Zinn, 335.

References

Fellow Workers. Philips, Utah and Difranco, Ani. Righteous Babe Records, NY, 1999.

Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Buhle, Paul and Schulman, Nicole, eds. Verso, NY, 2005.

Zinn, Howard (2001). A People's History of the United States (Revised and Updated ed.). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-093731-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

[1] Zinn, 335.

[1]

Early life and I.W.W. activity

Trial and execution

Labor Perspective

Influence and tributes

See also

Notes

References

External links