
JOE HILL - IWW Songwriter by Dean Nolan and Fred Thompson

		Education
		 *

Organization *       * Emancipation
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@   JOE HILL, IWW Songwriter
@@@ @@@                             @@@ @@@   born 1879; executed
1915  @@@ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

     Shortly after Salt Lake City police arrested Joe Hill on
January 13, 1914,  they got in touch with the Chief of Police at
San Pedro, California, where Hill had previously lived.  The Chief
of Police there had fought Hill's efforts to organize longshore
workers and replied:  *I see you have under arrest for murder one
Joseph Hillstrom.  You have the right man... He is certainly an
undesirable citizen.  He is somewhat of a musician and writer of
songs for the IWW Songbook.* //Salt Lake City _Herald-Republican_
Jan.23,1914.//

His meaning was clear.  Though he lacked details of the murder
with which Hill was charged, he had no doubt that Hill was *the
right man.*  For him, Hill symbolized working class threats to the
established order.  The men he admired did not want their workers
to organize, or to sing songs such as Joe Hill had written,
ridiculing them and the police, challenging their right to wealth
they had not produced.  From these biases it came about that Joe
Hill was tried and executed for a murder he did not commit.

Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Haggland on October 7, 1879 in
Gavle, Sweden.  One of 9 children, he was brought up in a
conservative and highly religious family atmosphere.  It was a
closely knit family in which both parents encouraged music, and
during his early years Joel learned to play the organ as well as
the violin, accordion and guitar.

In 1887 Joel's father Olaf, a railway conductor was injured at
work and died.  All members of the hard hit family had to earn
what they could, including 8-year old Joel who went to work in a
rope factory.  In his teens he contracted tuberculosis of the skin
and joints and was treated in a Stockholm hospital, but the
disease left his body scarred.  In 1902 his mother died and the
family fell apart.  He and his brother Paul left for America and
landed in New York.  Like many immigrants of the time, Joel
changed his name, first to Joseph Hillstrom and then to Joe Hill.

Few hard facts are known about Joe Hill's first 10 years in
America.  Although there are a number of stories about the places
he had been and things he had done, one account putting him in
Hawai'i, few can be substantiated.  His brother Paul later told
Ralph Chaplin that at first Joe worked as a porter in New York and
played piano in saloons there.  Joe did send a Christmas card to
his sister from Cleveland in 1905.  In April 1906 he was in San
Francisco during the Earthquake and wrote an account of it for his
hometown paper.

He became one of thousands of migrant workers who were building
America or harvesting its wheat.  Men who worked the harvests
later spoke of knowing him there, and he was in a picket camp on
the Canadian Northern Railway when the IWW struck it in 1912.  Joe
worked so much as a longshore worker that he referred to himself
as a *wharf rat.*  Bill Chance shacked with him in San Pedro,
where he worked longshore, but says Joe talked so little about
himself that he could add no details.  Neither could Alexander
McKay, who also worked with Hill, and wrote recollections of the
1912 San Diego free speech fight in 1947.

During the first half of 1911, Hill with his friend Sam Murray and
other IWW members and radicals who supported Madero and Magon in
the Mexican revolution were in Lower California, trying to protect
it from Diaz.  Hill was there only off and on, but he could not
have been there if he had not by that time dropped the
conservative views which he brought with him to America.  In 1913,
Hill was secretary of the local IWW formed in San Pedro.

The earliest parody written by Hill that we know of, went to the
hymn, *Sweet By and By*, a Salvation Army favorite.  It was
already in circulation before it appeared in the 1911 edition of
the IWW songbook.  It went:

**
     Long-haired preachers come out every night Try to tell you
     what's wrong and what's right But when asked about something
     to eat They will answer with voices so sweet:

     You will eat, by and by In that glorious land above the sky
     Work and pray, live on hay You'll get pie in the sky when you
     die.

     If you fight hard for children and wife Try to get something
     good in this life You're a sinner and a bad one they tell
     When you die you will surely go to hell /Chorus/**


Hill's song added a phrase *pie in the sky* to the American
vocabulary, a phrase often used by people who would be surprised
how it came about.  In those days before movies, before radio,
when phonograph was still an odd-sounding toy, the music most
available to workers, especially migratory workers of the West,
was that of the Salvation Army and other street evangelists.  They
usually performed along *skid road*, the section of town where
migratory workers could find the cheapest meals, the cheapest
*flops* or lodging, and a series of signs chalked on blackboards
offering them another job for a dollar -- roughly a day's pay at
the time.  These skid roads became the battlefield for worker's
minds, between those who wanted to keep things as they were, and
those who wanted to change and improve things.  Hill's parody had
several verses, the final verse and chorus running:

**
     Working folks of all countries unite Side by side we for
     freedom will fight When the world and its wealth we have
     gained To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

     You will eat, by and by When you've learned how to cook and
     how to fry Chop some wood, 'twill do you good And you'll eat
     in the sweet by and by.**


Hill's union, the Industrial Workers of the World, was launched in
1905 by the Western Federation of Miners, some smaller unions, and
rebels in better established ones, in the hope of bringing the
millions of unorganized workers and those in existing
organizations into One Big Union of the Working Class, so that no
group of workers could be used to break the strike of another
group.

Asserting as its name implied, the widest jurisdiction a union
could have, its concern was the welfare of the worldwide working
class, and its ultimate aim the reorganization of industry, to be
run by its workers for the general good.

Its practical activities were smaller scale, but notable.  In the
Pittsburgh industrial suburb of McKees Rocks in 1909, in response
to a call for help from car builders already out on strike and
excluded from the craft union a handful of skilled workers had
there, the IWW went in and won.  The strike drew wide attention,
for it proved that unskilled immigrant workers speaking with a
confusion of tongues, could stick together and win even though the
established unions refused to accept them.  On western
construction projects, in lumber camps and along the skid roads
where these migratory workers got their jobs, the IWW was engaged
in efforts to raise the pay, establish showers and laundry rooms
on these out-of- town jobs, and make the company provide beds and
bedding so that workers could discard the blanket rolls they had
carried on their backs.

In Spokane Washington the IWW concluded that the practical way to
organize the workers on these projects was to get them to make the
companies set up a free hiring system , by concerted refusal to
patronize the *job sharks* who sold them the right to hire out.
This could be done without risking a strike.  The IWW promoted the
idea from skid road soap boxes.  The soap box, an improvised stand
for a street speaker, was an established institution of the times.
It was used by evangelists, socialists, advocates of new diets and
currency reform, by the IWW, and by women who had the novel idea
that they too should be allowed to vote.

As the IWW campaign to bypass the job sharks became effective,
these employment agents countered by getting the Salvation Army or
other religious groups to drown out the IWW speakers with trumpet
and drum.  The IWW replied with song cards containing verses to be
sung to these hymn tunes.  Both used the song, *Where Is My
Wandering Boy Tonight?* that closed a still current melodrama, but
the IWW version depicted the wandering boy as being yanked by a
cop from a freight train and sent to a chain gang.  For another
Army favorite, *Revive Us Again*, the card carried:

**
     O why don't you work like other folks do?  How in hell can I
     work when there's no work to do?  Hallelujah, on the bum!
     Hallelujah bum again Hallelujah give us a handout to revive
     us again.**

These song cards in 1909 grew into the first IWW songbook, in its
early editions aimed mostly at the employment sharks.  Hill's
pie-in-the-sky song fit this skid road situation and so did
another he wrote to the hymn, *There Is Power In The Blood*:

**
     There is power there is power In the hands of the working
     folks When they stand, hand in hand That's a power, that's a
     power That must rule in every land One industrial union
     grand.**

When the employment agents found they could not win by drowning
out the speakers, they got the city council to pass an ordinance
denying the IWW the right to speak.  This led to the IWW Free
Speech Fight of 1909-1910 and to headlines about the IWW across
the nation.  Figuring the jail could only hold a limited number,
the IWW sent out a call for volunteers to test the
constitutionality of the ordinance.  These men mounted the box,
said a few words and were hauled to jail.  On the first day,
Nov.2,1909, a hundred and three were arrested.  By March, jails
and a schoolhouse turned into a jail were filled.  Jail conditions
and police brutality aroused wide indignation and created pressure
in lumber and construction camps to boycott Spokane merchants.  A
compromise was reached, the IWW resumed publication of its banned
_Industrial Worker_, spoke once more on the streets and laid the
basis for improved job conditions in the Inland Empire.

Similar free speech fights related to similar issues erupted in
Fresno, California in 1910, in San Diego in 1912, and in other
towns, with the same basic story.  Volunteer speakers were herded
to jail, brutalized by police and vigilantes, with the right of
free speech eventually asserted.

Did Joe Hill get arrested in these free speech fights?  Various
histories say he did, but always quote the same source of evidence
-- an account of a meeting in London England at the time of Hill's
execution, reported that various speakers there said he was
involved in these fights, and that is not good evidence.  A Hill
who addressed a San Francisco street meeting protesting San Diego
police brutality may have been some other Hill.  Those who knew
Hill describe him as a quiet man, not a speaker.

Another of Hill's songs, his parody of Casey Jones, got into wide
circulation months before it got into the IWW songbook.  He wrote
it in support of railroad  shopworkers who walked out on strike in
September 1911 throughout the Harriman system that stretched from
Illinois Central to the Southern Pacific.  These shop workers who
repaired rail cars and locomotives were divided among 16 different
craft unions and wanted to bargain as a federation.  Harriman said
no.  These shop workers struck over 4 years and still did not win,
because five other craft unions running the trains still ran them,
repaired them and hauled scabs into the shops.  It was a situation
that painfully illustrated the merits of the IWW argument for
industrial unionism, an argument it was almost alone in making in
those days.

By 1911 *Casey Jones* had come to mean *locomotive engineer*
because of a popular series of ballads memorializing the heroic
John Luther Jones of Cayce, Kentucky.  Jones had lost his life
April 29,1900 while saving the lives of his crew with his full
weight on the brakes as his engine plowed into a side-tracked
freight projecting into its path.  Wallace Saunders, a black
worker who took care of Jones' engine, wrote the original
version.

It was developed  by vaudeville song and dance teams into a
powerful rhythmic song, and well before Joe Hill wrote his union
parody, others had already added various unprinted verses
depicting Casey as the father of numerous children along his line.
It was a well known song identified with locomotive engineers, and
an appropriate vehicle for ridiculing how separate craft union
contracts obligated them to make emergency repairs to keep engines
running despite the bungling work of scab shop workers.  As the
song put it:

** The workers on the SP line to strike sent out a call But Casey
Jones was the engineer he wouldn't strike at all His boiler it was
leaking and his 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**

In Hill's version,  Casey met with an accident and *took a trip to
heaven* where St. Peter told him  *our musicians are on strike,
you can get a job a-scabbing any time you like*.  But the angels
got rid of him too.  The striking shopworkers welcomed this song
of humor and defiance and circulated it across the country.  In
the spring of 1912 Hill was in British Columbia during a strike on
the construction of Canadian Northern.  To the tune of *Wearing of
the Green*, he had the strikers promising to *build no more
railroads for overalls and snuff*.  One grievance was the poorly
constructed camps with walls made of potato sacks.  To the tune of
the *River Shannon* ballad, Hill wrote:

** These gunny sack contractors have all been dirty actors And
they're not our benefactors as each fellow worker knows So we've
got to stick together in fine or dirty weather And we'll show no
more white feather where the Fraser River flows.**

On this Fraser River strike he wrote other snatches used during
the strike but soon forgotten.  All used comic jabs to aggravate
the bosses and boost the morale of the workers, so they could look
down on their bosses for a change.  Many of his songs written for
specific strike situations paralleled experience elsewhere, and
had wide worker appeal.

He chose the popular songs of the day for parody.  The 1912
Songbook had one on  Irving Berlin's *Turkey Trot*, turning
*Everybody's Doing It* into an IWW song.  The optimism of
*Everybody's Joining It* was warranted by the growth of IWW in
southern lumber and in eastern textiles.  In January workers at
American Woolen Company, Lawrence Massachusetts, walked out and
asked IWW to handle their strike.  John Golden, head of UTW,
disgraced himself in the eyes of other union men and women, by
offering to supply scabs.  Hill sent the strikers a parody on a
Sunday School song, *A Little Talk With Golden Makes It Right, All
Right*.  They won their strike.

Hill had 9 new songs in the 1913 Songbook.  As if in anticipation
of what was brewing in Europe, 2 of the songs were
anti-militarist.  To the Irish air *Colleen Bawn* he wrote:

**
     We're spending billions every year For guns and ammunition
     Our Army and Our Navy dear To keep in good condition Why do
     they mount their Gatling guns A thousand miles from oceans
     Where hostile fleets could never run Ain't that a funny
     notion?**

Another, to the rollicking tune of *Sunlight* told the
disappointments of a lad who joined the Navy to see the world but
found he had to *scrub the deck and polish brass and shine the
captain's shoes.*

Some of his best-liked songs ridiculed the 1913 forerunners of
Archie Bunker, who blamed their troubles on foreigners and blacks.
To his Industrial Workers of the World, no worker could be a
foreigner.  *Steamboat Bill*  had a swinging rhythm for one of the
dances of 1913, and to it Joe added words about Scissorbill...

**
     He's found in every mining camp in lumber mill He looks just
     like a human, he can eat and walk But you will find he isn't
     when he starts to talk He'll say *This is my country* with an
     honest face While all the cops they chase him out of every
     place Scissorbill says, *This country must be freed From
     Negroes, Japs and Dutchmen and the gol-durn Swede...**

A similar worker was *Mr. Block who thinks he may be president
some day.*  The IWW was turning out songbooks in printings of
50,000 at a time, and Mr. Block inspired a cartoon strip about the
misfortunes that his lack of class consciousness brought on him.

The gender of the terms in Hill's songs reflects the circumstance
that out west the population was predominantly male, and its wage
earners almost entirely male.  This was balanced somewhat back
East by predominantly female textile towns.  Children were an
important part of the labor force and , except for the textile and
garment industries, women's main economic role was to produce
children and rear them to working age.  Here Hill was no sexist
either.  He wanted women in his union.  To the hit tune *Rainbow*,
he wrote in early 1913:

**
     We want the tinner and the skinner and the chambermaid We
     want the man that spikes on soles We want the man that's
     digging holes We want the man that's climbing poles And the
     trucker and the mucker and the hired man And all the factory
     girls and clerks Yes, we want every one that works...**

He wrote his own music for *That's the Rebel Girl, that's the
Rebel Girl, to the working class she's a precious pearl,*  and
said he considered that his best song.

In San Pedro, Hill had the use of a piano at Beacon Street Sailors
Mission, and many of his songs seem to have been written in San
Pedro.  He was secretary of the IWW local there and during a short
strike of dock workers was picked up by the police.  They tried to
get passengers on a street car to say he was the man who held them
up.  None would say so, but they gave Hill 30 days for vagrancy
anyway.

Late in 1913 Hill headed for the Salt Lake City area and got a job
in the machine shop at the Silver King Mine in Park City, where
Otto Applequist, a fellow Swede Joe had known in San Pedro, was
foreman.  In this area IWW's were not welcome either.  Earlier
that year the IWW had struck the Utah Construction project at
Tucker, and despite attacks by thugs, had won a 25-cent increase
and improved conditions.  The company retaliated by sending thugs
to attack the IWW street meetings in Salt Lake City, where the
police arrested the speakers instead of their attackers.

Somewhat before Christmas,  Hill and Applequist came to Salt Lake
City and visited the sizable Swedish community there, where Hill's
musical talents fitted the season's festivities.  They stayed at a
boarding house run by the Eselius family, some of whom both had
known in San Pedro.

It was in a room off the kitchen of this boarding house that Hill
was arrested Monday evening, January 13, 1914.  He lay in bed, a
bullet wound completely through his chest, grazing heart and
lungs, and under sedation.  As 3 police entered the room, he moved
an arm.  The chief of police fired at Hill, shattering his
knuckles.  Later he explained that he thought Hill might be
reaching for his gun, though he had none and though Dr. McHugh,
who had informed the police about treating Hill's wound, had told
them Hill was under morphine.  The chief had come to arrest him on
the theory that his wound might tie him to a revenge killing the
preceding Saturday night, Jan.10, in John Morrison's grocery.

John Morrison, a former police officer, had lived in continuous
fear of revenge.  He had exchanged shots with 3 assailants in his
store 7 years earlier, and one of them was killed by police in a
chase that followed.  Morrison had been attacked again the
previous September and had wounded one of his assailants.  He
spoke of his fear of revenge to several, including his wife, whom
he instructed in case of his death to ask police to investigate a
certain neighbor.  On the afternoon of his death Morrison had told
a police associate, Captain John Hemple, that he would gladly give
up all he had saved from years of hard work, to be free of his
fear of revenge.  Hemple told the press, *Morrison was in constant
dread of men he had arrested when he was a policeman.*

The revenge killing he had feared came as he was closing his store
at 10 o'clock Saturday night.  One son, Arling, was sweeping;  a
younger son, Merlin, was near the storeroom at the back.  Mr.
Morrison was dragging a sack of potatoes across the floor as two
masked men, both armed came into the store, hollered *We've got
you now!* shot Mr. Morrison as he bent over the sack of potatoes,
then shot the boy Arling and left.  A revolver on the floor near
Arling, belonging to Morrison, probably indicates that Arling was
not an intended victim, but was shot as he came out with the
store's revolver which was kept in the icebox.

Years later a charge against Joe Hill, more serious to students of
labor history than any police contention, was made by historian
Vernon Jensen in the *Industrial and Labor Relations Review* April
1951.  There, Jensen wrote that Dr. McHugh, who had treated Hill's
chest wound, had told him in the late forties that Hill had
confessed the Morrison murder to him.  According to his account,
McHugh had asked Hill on Monday evening whether he had shot
Morrison, and Hill had answered, *I shot him in self defense.  The
older man reached for the gun and I shot him and the younger boy
grabbed the gun and shot me and I shot him to save my life.  I
wanted some money to get out of town.*  Dr.  McHugh had given no
such story to the police nor in the trial.  The alleged confession
does not fit the known facts, for Mr. Morrison was shot while
dragging a sack of potatoes across the center aisle where he had
no access to the gun that was in the icebox.  It was plainly a
revenge killing, with no hindrance to robbery, but no robbery
attempted.

But back to 1914.  Until Dr. McHugh, who had met Hill at social
events and knew him as the author of IWW parodies, notified the
police about Hill's wound and arranged to sedate him, the police
had followed the obvious revenge clues but without success.

The Morrison gun had one spent cartridge.  It was the practice of
Salt Lake City police to let the hammer rest on an empty chamber
or discharged cartridge as an extra safety precaution.  No bullet
from the Morrison gun was found in the store, and probably it was
not fired; yet it could have been, if the bullet remained in the
body of the man it hit.  Neighbors who rushed to the store on
hearing the shots, said that one of two masked men held his hands
to his chest as though wounded; one neighbor reported the only
words spoken by the pair as *I'm shot,* while another heard this
as *Oh Bob.*  There were blood stains on the ground.  So police
considered that one of the two men may have been wounded by the
Morrison gun.  Hill's wound, however, went completely through his
chest.

Blood stains on the ground led in diverse directions.  Some went
down alleys, some to warehouses, some to railroad tracks.  They
could not have all been made by one man, and all they led to was a
dog with a bleeding paw.  Two men were apprehended in the alley as
they grabbed a freight leaving town; they were wanted in Arizona
for a $300 robbery, and were ruled out as suspects somehow.  Other
suspects were taken in and released.  A man had been seen lying in
a ditch at 11:30 Saturday night, and got up and ran away when a
passerby asked him if he needed help.  Later a streetcar conductor
reported the man had taken the streetcar downtown and identified
him as Frank Z. Wilson, an ex-convict Morrison had helped send to
prison.

The revenge theory and all other trails were dropped by police
once they arrested Hill. The doctor who had told them about Hill
knew him as the man who wrote those IWW songs, and like the Chief
of Police in San Pedro, they were satisfied they had *the right
man.* One circumstance may have made them prone to forget the
revenge motive and convict Hill:

this would end a blood feud that had been going on between
Morrison and some gang, a feud that would likely continue against
any officers convicting members of that gang.

They now had a chance to end all this while disposing of an
*undesirable citizen*, a stranger, whose union and whose songs
they hated anyway.  On Jan.23 through the local press the police
informed all, including the gang members, that Joe Hill the IWW
songwriter was the man they would try to convict for the Morrison
murder.

The unjust convictions that have evoked wide indignation have
usually started out, not as a conspiracy by some executive
committee of the elite, but as one of the more or less routine
injustices that lower authorities perpetrate, confronting those
higher up with something congenial to their biases.  Their
superiors must go along, despite public outcry, or admit the
criminal character and class bias of law enforcement.

The only link the police offered to connect Hill with the Morrison
murder was the fact that he had a bullet wound for which he
offered no explanation, and the Morrison gun may have been fired.
The neighbors who saw the 2 masked men flee could give no
trustworthy identification, but did try to.  Merlin Morrison, the
youngest son, 13 at the time and still living in 1979,  said when
taken to the jail on the 14th to see Hill: *Hillstrom is about the
same size and height as one of the men who entered my father's
store Saturday night.  AS the light was bad, I could not get a
lasting impression of the man's features, but Hillstrom appears to
be very much the same build as the man who entered the store and
whom I saw fire at my father--*  or that is how the _Salt Lake
Tribune_, the only available record, reported the comments of this
13-year old boy.  Again according to the press, for the transcript
has been lost, Merlin said much the same at the trial.  Hill gave
a very different account in September 1915, when in a statement to
the Utah Board of Pardons, he recalled Merlin Morrison's visit to
the jail thus:

*He was the first one to come up and look at me in the morning
after my arrest. Being only a little boy, he spoke his mind right
out in my presence, and this is what he said:  *No, that is not
the man at all. The ones I saw were shorter and heavier set.*
When he testified at the preliminary hearing, I asked him if he
did not make that statement but he denied it.*

Hill was arraigned on Jan.27, and his preliminary hearing set for
the next day.  At the hearing he questioned the boy and two other
witnesses, for he had no attorney, and presented no defense.
Trial was set for June 17.  A few days after this January hearing,
E.D.McDougall, an attorney, visited Hill and offered his services
for free.  Hill accepted them, for he had told Ed Rowan, the local
IWW secretary who had visited him after the local press published
his picture, that this did not involve the IWW and he did not want
the union to get him a lawyer.  McDougall's poor services at the
June trial led some to wonder if the mysterious offer of free help
could have been part of the plan to make sure Hill lost.

The sole link to the Morrison murder was Hill's wound.  How did he
get it?  To this day no one knows.  A widely held belief ran that
he got it out of some romantic affair, but the evidence for this
is slim;  that a newspaper said that Dr. McHugh told a reporter
that was what Hill told him.  Hill himself offered no one an
explanation.  The physical evidence shows that Hill was shot from
the front, with his jacket on but no overcoat, so presumably
indoors, with his hands raised high as if he had been held up,
thus pulling his jacket high, and somewhere about an hour after
the Morrison murder, and several miles away from the Morrison
store.

He walked to Dr. McHugh's office, which was also the doctor's home
about five miles from the Morrison store, about 11:30 Jan.10,
rather freshly wounded, his shirt bloodied, his heart grazed, his
lung bleeding.  There was no bullet hole in his overcoat, though
the bullet had gone through his torso, front and back of his
jacket and shirts -- and had been left wherever he was shot, which
could not, then, have been the Morrison store.

Hill insisted that how he got wounded was his own business and
that he owed no one any explanation.  But some of his statements,
combined with other data, do bear on the question.  He did have a
gun when he entered Dr. McHugh's office.  He said he was not armed
when he was shot.  He threw the gun away on his ride from the
doctor's office to his boarding house.  Later he went with police
unsuccessfully trying to find the gun, and with the police did
establish that he had bought a gun in a Salt Lake pawn shop.  He
hoped by identifying the gun or its make to establish that it
could not have been the gun that killed the Morrisons.  When he
was arrested the police found in his pants pocket a note from his
associate Applequist, reading:  *Hilda and Christina were here. We
went to the Empress.  Tried to find you. Otto.*

The Empress was a local theater.  There were conflicting accounts
of whether Applequist was in the Eselius home when Hill returned
wounded, but he was neither seen there nor identified anywhere
else thereafter.

These circumstances do make a much better case than the police had
against Joe for this chain of events:  that Hill went out Saturday
evening leaving his gun at the boarding house; that later he
returned and picked up the note;  that he then went out and
somehow got shot and obtained the gun from the person who shot
him.  For this to be the gun he had bought in the pawn shop, his
assailant must have obtained it from the Eselius boarding house,
making him most likely Otto Applequist.  Whether this is how it
happened involves limited conjecture.

Anyway, Hill consistently refused to say how he got wounded.  Some
urged that he might save his life by telling.  He replied that if
those who did know did not come forward freely on their own
account it would be useless for him to identify them.  So he stuck
to his position that it was not up to him to prove himself
innocent, but up to the police, if he was guilty, to prove that.
A good lawyer could have shredded the prosecution's case, and have
used physical facts about the wound to show that Hill could not
have been wounded in the Morrison store or about 10 o'clock.  His
trial in June was a farce in which he tried to dismiss Attorney
McDougall for not cross-examining witnesses, but he lacked the
courtroom skills to bring out the facts himself.

Belatedly a new attorney, Sorn Christensen, was added through the
efforts of Virginia Snow Stephen and Orrin Hilton.  The court
would not let them present any evidence of the fears Morrison had
about revenge.  They did get a chance to show that the police had
tried to get a member of the Eselius household to lie against Hill
under threat of jailing her son.  The court would not let them ask
Dr. Beer whether the holes in Hill's body and jacket could be
accounted for except that he was shot with his arms held high.
The court would not instruct the jury in accordance with Utah
precedent that such circumstantial evidence must be like a chain
with no defective link; instead the court instructed them to
consider the preponderance of the evidence.  McDougall got in a
closing speech that botched the defense presentation, and Hill was
convicted June 27.

On July 8 the judge asked Hill whether he would prefer to be
hanged or shot.  He answered:

* I 'll take shooting.  I have been shot a few times and I guess I
can stand it again.*  On September 1, a motion for new trial was
denied.  In May 1915, Orrin Hilton argued the case before the Utah
Supreme Court.  In its decision the court dodged defense
contentions by saying it could not attempt to do the work of the
jury or make up the bad judgement of the jurors, but on those
bullet holes it did exert more creative imagination.  It argued
they could be low in the coat but high in Hill's body if he got
shot leaning over the counter with his coat pulled opposite to the
direction this would pull it -- and that Hill's possession of
these bullet holes identified him as clearly as if he has stolen
goods form the Morrison Store.

On September 18, 1915, the same imaginative gentlemen met along
with the Governor and Attorney General to sit as the Board of
Pardons much in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan's Lord High
Executioner.  They could not reconsider what they had already
passed upon, but did here meet with Hill face to face.  Knowing
his adamant position about revealing nothing on how he got shot,
they urged him to tell them or attorneys privately.  Hill said
what he wanted was a new trial where witnesses could be properly
cross-examined.  Any ordinary crook could long before this have
arranged with friends to set up some satisfactory explanation
about how he got shot -- but this was not Hill's way.

During these months in jail Hill wrote more songs. The fracture of
the knuckles on his hand impeded writing, but he turned out music
to go with the words for *The Rebel Girl* and
*Workers of the World Awaken.*  These two songs are less in the
vernacular of the job than most of his songs, but show that in
jail he had not lost the perspective of job action:

**   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 nations Will at their command stand
     still**

Locked up, Hill was missing acquaintance with the new song hits.
Europe was at war, marching to *It's a Long Way to Tipperary*, and
Sam Murray sent him a copy with a request for something for the
unemployed around San Francisco, where many had come hoping to get
jobs at the World's Fair.  Hill made a song about Bill Brown's job
hunt that left him singing:

**   It's a long way down to the soupline It's a long way to go
     It's a long way down to the soupline And the soup is weak I
     know Goodbye, good old pork chops Farewell beefsteak rare
     It's a long way down to the soupline But my soup is there.**
Meanwhile a worldwide protest grew on his behalf, paralleled only
by concern in 1918 for Tom Mooney and in 1927 for Sacco and
Vanzetti.   From September 22, 1915 on, the Swedish government
actively intervened on his behalf and induced President Wilson to
do likewise, even though this was a state and not a federal matter
and Utah officials and press resented this interference.  Hill was
to have been shot October 1, but on September 30, after he had
written farewell letters beneath the eye of a death-watch, a stay
was granted to October 16 when the Pardon Board was to reconvene.
The Swedish Prime Minister urged Hill to conciliate the Board of
Pardons with an explanation about his wound, but Hill refused and
said he wanted a new trial.  Since he was charged with the murder
of only the elder Morrison, the State could have provided a new
trial without conceding an inch on its previous conviction, by
deferring execution on that score while he stood trial for the
murder of Arling Morrison -- but it did not want to give Hill that
chance to cross examine its witnesses and lay a foundation for
witnesses he might then call.  On October 18, he was sentenced to
be shot November 19.

The massive protest continued to grow, with a new issue in
November.  On October 30, Salt Lake City police officer Myton took
exception to remarks made by R.J. Horton in a street talk on
behalf of Hill, and shot and killed Horton.  On November 16, the
American Federation of Labor in convention assembled resolved that
the Governor should grant Hill a new trial.  Telegrams and letters
of protest came to the governor by the hundred daily, and also
threatening letters, some traced later to a detective agency.
Preparations to protect the governor from some imagined attack
were much publicized.  Hill worked calmly on a new song dedicated
to the dove of peace.  He wired Bill Haywood, general secretary of
the IWW: *Don't waste any time in mourning -- organize.*  At 10
p.m., November 18, Hill handed a guard a slip of paper headed *My
Last Will*.

**   My will is easy to decide For I have nothing to divide My
     kith 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.**

After a funeral service in Salt Lake City, Hill's body was brought
to Chicago. The funeral fell on Thanksgiving day.  Thousands had
to be turned away from the West Side Auditorium.  The streets were
crowded for many blocks by those following the coffin, shocking
others by singing Joe Hill's songs.  In accordance with his Will,
his body was cremated and his ashes distributed the following May
1 by rebels in many lands.

***note: An urn of Hill's ashes turned up in a Postal office in
the 1980's.  See append.***

Joe Hill has become known as *the man who never died*, the title
Barrie Stavis gave to his 1951 play about Hill.  His songs are
still sung, and he is not forgotten.  The 100th anniversary of his
birthday is being honored by labor movements in many places,
taking as the theme his wire:  *Don't mourn -- organize.*  There
is a demand for his exoneration as Sacco and Vanzetti have been
exonerated because they and the injustice to them have not been
forgotten either.

Hill's union has regularly memorialized his execution in November,
along with others who gave up their lives in labor struggles in
other Novembers:  the 8-hour advocates who were hanged in Chicago
November 11, 1887;  the free speech fighters shot down on the
_Verona_ at Everett, Washington November 5, 1916;  Wesley Everest
lynched for defending the Lumber Workers hall in Centralia,
Washington November 11, 1919;  the miners shot down at the
Columbine Mine in Colorado November 21, 1927; and others.  Ralph
Chaplin wrote a verse for all of these:

**   Red November, black November Bleak November, black and red
     Hallowed month of labor's martyrs Labor's heroes, labor's
     dead.

     Labor's wrath and hope and sorrow Red the promise, black the
     threat Who are we not to remember?  Who are we to dare
     forget?

     Black and red the colors blended Black and red the pledge we
     made Red until the fight is ended Black until the debt is
     paid.**

Hill soon became a legendary figure.  References to him came up in
more publications than one would want to count.  A man is most
likely to turn into myth and legend when his life becomes a symbol
of some widely felt wish.  There was an inkling of this in the
unexpected thousands who filled Chicago streets for his funeral,
for most of them were outside the groups that had been demanding a
new trial.  Some were there because they loved his songs.

Some admired his determined stand that a man need not prove
himself innocent, for they knew how hard it often is for migratory
workers to prove the most simple facts about their lives.  Some
admired the man who could write that final will.  All who marched
felt he was a man on their side, against those who were cheating
them out of the life they wanted -- a man worth imitating.

In 1925 Alfred Hayes wrote a poem,  *I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last
Night*, that became widely known through the labor movement after
Earl Robinson set it to music in the 30's.  A line in that ballad,
* I never died, said he* suggested the title to Barrie Stavis's
play, a play prefaced with one of the first serious attempts to
assemble the facts of Hill's life.  In Sweden in 1951, Ture Nerman
published the information of Hill's boyhood as Joel Haggland
-- information quite new to Hill's friends.

In 1964, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) brought out a
documentary on Hill in their Other Voices series, in which Don
Francks sang many of Hill's songs against a background depicting
his life here.  Two years later Phil Ochs wrote words and music
for a lengthy ballad.  In 1970 the University of Utah Press
brought out Gibbs Smith's _Joe Hill_, the most complete study of
the man yet written, and republished later as a Grosset & Dunlap
paperback under the title _Labor's Martyr, Joe Hill_.

In Sweden and California, Bo Widerberg produced a rather
imaginative film on Hill.  The Swedish union SAC has honored Hill
by making his birthplace into a labor museum.  When King Gustav of
Sweden visited America in 1976, he brought to the Walter Reuther
Labor History Archives at Wayne State University, where old IWW
records are preserved, copies of the extensive correspondence
between the Swedish government and the American authorities on
behalf of Hill.  A visitor to Geneva, Switzerland, reports seeing
Hill, bigger than life, decorating the walls of more than one
office of the trade union internationals centered there.

There is that about Joe Hill that has endeared him to union people
around the world, including many who know they might have quite an
argument with Joe if they could meet.  These many expressions of
regard and plans to celebrate his 100th birthday October 7, 1979,
have developed largely outside of Hill's union.  Hill's
persistence as an enduring symbol is thus not some artifice
maintained by a handful, but part of the process, like his funeral
procession, through which the working class shapes its hopes and
values.  Hill has become an industrial William Tell.  William Tell
was assumed to be a real person in history until it was found that
his story, or one like it, is to be found wherever there is a
class society and the oppression that accompanies it.

Joe Hill, however, was a real man as well as a legend.  He did
live.  He did organize for the IWW.  He plainly had it in mind in
his final wire:  *Don't mourn -- organize*.  The IWW, a bit
legendary too, is still here trying to achieve Hill's hopes for a
world run by workers, able to run it for their own good when they
reach an understanding not to scab on each other, or shoot each
other, or let themselves be used against each other in any way.
The world has changed since 1915.  Then Hill's vision of world
labor solidarity was a decorative sentiment in a world torn by a
war fought with weapons now obsolete.  Today that vision of world
labor solidarity has become indispensable to human survival.  Is
it too optimistic to feel that the warmth shown Joe Hill in 1979
is a recognition of this fact?

	  * * *

On May 29, 1979, Harriet L. Marcus, Vice-Chairman of the Utah
Board of Pardons replied to Folke G. Anderson, a Swedish-American
musician who has sought exoneration for Hill.  She wrote:  *Dear
Mr. Anderson:  The Board feels that it would be inappropriate to
grant a retroactive pardon in an ambiguous case.*

If the case was ambiguous, why did they shoot Joe Hill?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>DON'T MOURN -- ORGANIZE<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<


