A Labor Day Story

A Labor Day Story

(from aflcio.org)

Joe Hill (1879-1915)

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 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.

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. With his mother’s death in 1902, the future Joe Hill and his younger brother, Paul, booked passage to the United States.

Little is known of Hill’s doings or whereabouts for the next 12 years. In 1910 the record finds him in San Pedro, California, where he joined the IWW, served for several years as the secretary for the San Pedro local and wrote many of his most famous songs. His songs addressed the experience of virtually every 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. In 1912, Hill apparently was active in a “Free Speech” coalition 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.

On Jan. 10, 1914, Hill knocked on the door of a Salt Lake City doctor 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 labor radicals, activists and sympathizers including AFL President Samuel Gompers, 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.

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!”

After a brief service in Salt Lake City, Hill’s body was sent to Chicago, where thousands of mourners 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 songwriter colleagues, Ralph Chaplin, 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? 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

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  1. Enjoyed learning about Joel Hagglund aka Joe Hill’s hard, ultimately fatally won fame as the best-known IWW martyr and labor folk hero, the ‘Troubadour Of Discontent’. He certainly had a difficult but worthwhile life in the service of others. Obviously many lives, and many many after those, were changed for the better because of his never-ending efforts.
    Always the way it has been and I think sadly always the way it will be, the real heroes are silenced this way. We can never know the extent of accomplishment rights activists like this man, Kennedy, King, and others would have personally reached. Even musicians promoting peace and harmony like Lennon and many others are silenced. Thank God they live on in others, and still others will emerge.
    Thank you Laurie, for your greatly appreciated continued and talented effort toward enlightenment and entertainment you provide to Senior Chatters via your blogs.