WIN REVIEW
Don’t Cry for Joe -- Organize!
The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and
Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon
By William m. Adler
New York: Bloomsbury, USA; 2011; $30, hardcover
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,” says he.
“Joe Hill,” by Alfred Hayes, 1934
(music by Earl Robinson, 1936)
No discussion of protest and music is complete without acknowledging the contributions of the “Wobblies,” the members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW preached anarchism, socialism, and revolution; dreamed of “one big union” that would organize all working people to “overthrow the employing class”; practiced direct action; and sang all the way to the picket line and on it.
Founded in 1905 as a radical alternative to the pro-capitalist American Federation of Labor, the IWW advocated far more than collective bargaining. “Direct action” in Wobbly terms included industry-wide strikes, general strikes, what we now call civil disobedience, and, when necessary, sabotage. And early on, the union discovered the power of music as an organizing tool. Using well-known tunes (often hymns) for their melodies, members of the union penned new, fiercely topical lyrics and sang them as they marched, at street meetings, in jails. The songs were rooted in ongoing struggles and campaigns. “Goodbye Dollars, I Must Leave you,” was about job agencies that gouged workers’ meager earnings, often for nonexistent jobs. By 1907, Richard Brazier, a Wobbly and a Canadian miner, had conceived The Little Red Songbook, which would publish songs like “Goodbye Dollars” in more-or-less regular editions and be sold at meetings and on street corners for a dime.
The IWW, of course, didn’t invent music as a tool of resistance. Coded songs like the spirituals “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Get on Board, Little Children” had shown slaves the way to freedom for a century before Emancipation. But the Wobblies brought the music of resistance out into the open, saying what they meant in most explicit terms. As Brazier wrote, “We will have songs of anger and protest, songs which shall call to judgment our oppressors and the Profit System they have devised.”
Of all the Wobbly songsmiths, the best-known was a Swedish immigrant whose Anglicized name was Joe Hill. He would become known to the wider world when in 1914 he was condemned to death in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the fatal shooting of a store owner—a murder Hill almost certainly didn’t commit.
A new biography by William M. Adler, The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon, places Hill’s life and death in the context of the IWW story—because they were inextricably bound together. As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would do a dozen years later to two other immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Utah executed Joe Hill at least as much for his politics as for the crime of which it found him guilty.
He had come to those politics the hard way. He was born Joel Hägglund in the city of Gävle on the Baltic coast of Sweden in 1879, the child of two gifted amateur musicians. In 1887, when his railroad-conductor father died after an accident, his family plummeted into poverty. Even more devastating was young Joel’s struggle with tuberculosis, which hospitalized him on and off from age 17 to 21. Music was his consolation; he said later, “I would rather play the fiddle than eat.” When his mother died, there was little to hold him in Sweden. He left it forever in 1902, when he was 21.
In the United States, he worked his way west doing manual labor. Somewhere between the East Coast and the West, between 1902 and 1910, Joel Hägglund of Gävle became Joe Hill of the Industrial Workers of the World. Records of those years are scanty, but two bylined articles bracket the name change and union affiliation. He was in San Francisco during the great earthquake of 1906 and wrote an article about it for his hometown newspaper in Gävle, signing it Joel Hägglund; four years later, he signed an article in an IWW paper, “Joe Hill, Portland Local.”
It’s also not known exactly when he started writing the songs for which he would become famous. One disputed account has him penning (or co-authoring) the Wobbly marching song “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” as early as 1907. Another dates the first version of his signature tune, “Long-Haired Preachers” (satirizing the Salvation Army with the lyric “you’ll have pie in the sky when you die—that’s a lie!”), to the same period. He wasn’t published in The Little Red Songbook until 1912, but by that time, Wobblies across the country had been singing his songs for several years. By late summer 1913, when he drifted into Salt Lake City, he was nationally known in IWW circles. He lived in Salt Lake for five months, until he was arrested on January 14, 1914, and charged with the January 10 murder of grocer John Morrison.
Morrison and one of his sons had been killed by two men who had entered his store, declaring, by one account, “We’ve got you now.” Before dying, the son had shot one of them, as witnessed by Morrison’s younger son. Later that night, Joe Hill had visited a doctor for treatment of a gunshot wound.
That wound was the only evidence linking him to the crime. It was never shown that Hill was shot by the gun in Morrison’s store, nor did any witnesses definitively place him in or near the store, nor was there any evidence that he had ever had any contact with Morrison that could suggest a motive. yet after a short trial that pitted Hill against a prosecution team that appeared to include the judge and the Salt Lake City press, the jury declared him guilty and the judge sentenced him to death.
The case became a cause célèbre. Wobblies across the country demanded his freedom; Helen Keller — the famous deaf and blind speaker and author who was also a radical socialist and IWW member—personally appealed to President Woodrow Wilson to ask Utah for clemency. But Hill, who had refused to testify about how he was wounded — he believed that the evidence against him was so flimsy that conviction was impossible — wanted no part of clemency; he wanted a new, fair, trial.
That never happened. Twenty-two months after the verdict, he was executed by firing squad in a courtyard of Utah State Prison. In The Man Who Never Died, Adler reveals documents pointing to another, likelier suspect in the crime, whom Utah authorities failed to pursue. Other documents suggest that Hill may have refused to testify about how he was wounded because he was shot by a friend in a quarrel over a woman.
But the degree of conjecture involved in solving the century-old crime renders the detective work less than gripping; indeed, so much of Adler’s narration of Hill’s U.S. years is conjecture that Hill himself never entirely comes alive. The real strength of The Man Who Never Died is less in its portrait of Hill than in its rousing depiction of Hill’s times, especially the extraordinary decade in which the IWW flowered. In 1911 alone, Wobblies in the East played a leading role in the “Bread and Roses” textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at the same time that in the West many fought on the Baja California front of the Mexican Revolution. (Hill was one of that number.) And the account of the discovery of music as an organizing tool is nothing less than thrilling, at least for those of us who have ever sung on a picket line or a protest.
Hill made two last requests before he faced the firing squad: that his body not be buried in Utah — he said he wouldn’t want “to be found dead” there — and that rather than mourning for him, his friends should organize. As to the first, friends and followers scattered his ashes “over five continents and forty-seven of the forty-eight states — all except Utah.” As to the second, almost a century after the shots rang out in Utah State Prison, his name and his voice ring out in songs celebrating the ongoing struggle for justice for working people. And thousands still wear buttons reading, “Don’t Mourn—Organize!” at civil disobedience actions everywhere.
