Joe Hill was executed by a state of Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915 at dawn framed for a murder that many believe he did not commit.An innocent man condemned to death for his passion. Many historians have come to recognise it as one of the worst travesties of Justice in American history. After a trial that was riddled with biased rulings and suppression of important defence evidence and other violations of judicial procedure, which was characteristic of many cases involving labour radicals.
Born Joel Emmauel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, the future labor "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, emigrated to the United States in 1902, where he changed his name to Joseph Hillstrom.
After several years as an itinerant worker - a 'hobo' working at a wide variety of back-breaking jobs, trying to make his way in this new country. In 1905 he joined the IWW (The International Workers of the World) becomming a well known and successful organiser .As a writer, a man of wit and insight, he knew how to craft songs that informed, inspired and inflamed. He followed a template for songwriting that was used from the American Revolution to Woody Guthrie to the Southern Civil Rights Movement, taking well-know tunes and writing new words that made the songs leap to life in a new and changing world. Soon his humorous and biting political songs like "The Preacher and the Slave" were being sung on political lines across the country. 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 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.
From his jail cell on November 18, 1915, Joe Hill wrote his last will, which has since become a prized piece of poetry in the heritage of the American Labour Movement. That same day, he sent a telegram to fellow IWW member Bill Haywood telling him “Don’t waste time mourning – Organize!” a line that became a slogan of the U.S. labour movement.The state wanted to silence Joe Hill, in defiance, he goaded his executioners with his last words . 'Fire -go and fire! Hill died as he lived a true rebel.
After a brief service in Salt Lake City, Hill's body was sent to Chicago, where 30,000 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 the poem that follows. Hill became, and he has remained, the best-known IWW martyr and labor folk hero, more famous now in death than in life Hill is also a revered figure in his native Sweden where he has been commemorated on postage stamps and where his childhood home is reverantly preserved as a museum, he has appeared in fiction, poetry and plays and has inspired several works of art. Most notably in linocut posters hand produced by Wobbly artist, poet and editor Carlos Cortez.
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
Steve Earle reads Joe Hill
The poem, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," written by the British writer Alfred Hayes in 1925 and set to music in 1936 by Earl Robinson, has been performed and recorded by scores of musicians and translated into 15 languages; it is still sung by workers throughout the world,as an inspiration dor organizing labor and other community movements.In 1958 Paul Robeson performed a version at his Carnegie Hall concert. Ideas and songs can never die.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill Last Night - Paul Robeson
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead,"
"I never died," says he.
"I never died," says 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,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Says Joe, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize."
"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where working men are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side."
From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill -
Where working men defend their rights
It's there you'll find Joe Hill.
It's there you'll find Joe Hill.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead",
"I never died," says he.
"I never died," says he.
