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JOE HILL
(1879-1915)
ABOUT THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOE HILL.
A songwriter, itinerant laborer, and union
organizer, Joe Hill became famous around the world after a Utah court
convicted him of murder. Even before the international campaign to have his
conviction reversed, however, Joe Hill was well known in hobo jungles, on
picket lines and at workers' rallies as the author of popular labor songs and
as an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) agitator. Thanks in large part to
his songs and to his stirring, well -- publicized call to his fellow workers
on the eve of his execution -- "Don't waste time mourning,
organize!" --Hill became, and he has remained, the best -- known IWW
martyr and labor folk hero.
 Born Joel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, the future
"troubadour of discontent" grew up the fourth of six surviving
children in a devoutly religious Lutheran family in Gävle, Sweden, where his
father, Olaf, worked as a railroad conductor. Both his parents enjoyed music
and often led the family in song. As a young man, Hill composed songs about
members of his family, attended concerts at the workers' association hall in Gävle
and played piano in a local café.
In 1887, Hill's father died from an occupational injury and
the children were forced to quit school to support themselves. The 9-year-old
Hill worked in a rope factory and later as a fireman on a steam-powered crane.
Stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis in 1900, Hill moved to Stockholm in
search of a cure and worked odd jobs while receiving radiation treatment and
enduring a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck. Two years
later, Hill's mother, Margareta Katarina Hägglund, died after also undergoing
a series of operations to cure a persistent back ailment. With her death, the
six surviving Hägglund children sold the family home and ventured out on
their own. Four of them settled elsewhere in Sweden, but the future Joe Hill
and his younger brother, Paul, booked passage to the United States in 1902.
Little is known of Hill's doings or whereabouts for the next
12 years. He reportedly worked at various odd jobs in New York before striking
out for Chicago, where he worked in a machine shop, got fired and was
blacklisted for trying to organize a union. The record finds him in Cleveland
in 1905, in San Francisco during the April 1906 Great Earthquake and in San
Pedro, Calif., in 1910. There he joined the IWW, served for several years as
the secretary for the San Pedro local and wrote many of his most famous songs,
including "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones—A
Union Scab." His songs, appearing in the IWW's "Little Red Song
Book," addressed the experience of vitually every major IWW group, from
immigrant factory workers to homeless migratory workers to railway shopcraft
workers.
In 1911, he was in Tijuana, Mexico, part of an army of
several hundred wandering hoboes and radicals who sought to overthrow the
Mexican dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, seize Baja California, emancipate the
working class and declare industrial freedom. (The invasion lasted six months
before internal dissension and a large detachment of better—trained Mexican
troops drove the last 100 rebels back across the border.) In 1912, Hill
apparently was active in a "Free Speech" coalition of Wobblies,
socialists, single taxers, suffragists and AFL members in San Diego that
protested a police decision to close the downtown area to street meetings. He
also put in an appearance at a railroad construction crew strike in British
Columbia, writing several songs before returning to San Pedro, where he lent
musical support to a strike of Italian dockworkers.
The San Pedro dockworkers' strike led to Hill's first
recorded encounter with the police, who arrested him in June 1913 and held him
for 30 days on a charge of vagrancy because, he said later, he was "a
little too active to suit the chief of the burg" during the strike. On
Jan. 10, 1914, Hill knocked on the door of a Salt Lake City doctor at 11:30
p.m. asking to be treated for a gunshot wound he said was inflicted by an
angry husband who had accused Hill of insulting his wife. Earlier that
evening, in another part of town, a grocer and his son had been killed. One of
the assailants was wounded in the chest by the younger victim before he died.
Hill's injury therefore tied him to the incident. The uncertain testimony of
two eyewitnesses and the lack of any corroboration of Hill's alibi convinced a
local jury of Hill's guilt, even though neither witness was able to identify
Hill conclusively and the gun used in the murders was never recovered.
The campaign to exonerate Hill began two months before the
trial and continued up to and even beyond his execution by firing squad on
Nov. 19, 1915. His supporters included the socially prominent daughter of a
former Mormon church president, labor radicals, activists and sympathizers
including AFL President Samuel Gompers, the Swedish minister to the United
States and even President Woodrow Wilson. The Utah Supreme Court, however,
refused to overturn the verdict and the Utah Board of Pardons refused to
commute Hill's sentence. The board declared its willingness to hear testimony
from the woman's husband in a closed session, but Hill refused to identify his
alleged assailant, insisting that to do so would harm the reputation of the
lady.
Hill became more famous in death than he had been in life.
To Bill Haywood, the former president of the Western Federation of Miners and
the best-known leader of the IWW, Hill wrote: "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." Apparently he
did die like a rebel. A member of the firing squad at his execution claimed
that the command to "Fire!" had come from Hill himself.
After a brief service in Salt Lake City, Hill's body was
sent to Chicago, where thousands of mourners heard Hill's "Rebel
Girl" sung for the first time, listened to hours of speeches and then
walked behind his casket to Graceland Cemetery, where the body was cremated
and the ashes mailed to IWW locals in every state but Utah as well as to
supporters in every inhabited continent on the globe. According to one of
Hill's Wobbly-songwriter colleagues, Ralph Chaplin (who wrote the words to
"Solidarity Forever," among other songs), all the envelopes were
opened on May 1, 1916, and their contents scattered to the winds, in
accordance with Hill's last wishes, expressed in a poem written on the eve of
his death:
My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some fading flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flowers then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to you.
Joe Hill
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