LHR Chapter One - Joe Hill

 LABOR HEROES REMEMBERED

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Every day a legion of citizens passes away into eternity, taking many of their stories, histories, and memories away with them forever.  >>

Chapter One: Joe Hill

I. Arrival in US and the Wobblies

Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden in 1879. Joe was third of nine children born to working-class parents, and three of his siblings perished in the years to come. When Joe was 8 years old his father, an engineer, died at the age of 41 and the family was plunged into economic ruin.

Joe's mother, Margareta Catharina, kept the family together through hard work and sheer will, until her death in 1902 when Joe was 23. With five siblings orphaned and no one to play breadwinner, Joe decided to go to America to seek his fortune and take care of his family.

II. Working Across America: Early Red Scare

Before there was McCarthy and his Red Hunt in the 50's there was the Labor Battles of the early 20th Century, led by young idealists from Europe who'd already had their battles for the rights of the working commoner. It seems impossible that all of this - in addition to the uprising of Communism and Socialism in Eastern Europe and the growth and strength of the Soviet Union post World War II - were a coincidence, yet here it was happening a World apart. Ideas spreading like wildfire and threatening the very institutions that this nation is founded on. The Red was spreading, and it had to be stopped at all costs.

Labor and Management clashed in factories and sewing rooms and mines all across the Midwest, led over and over again by educated, justice-hungry young people who'd seen their brothers and sisters gunned down by French paramilitary forces. Who'd watched the tensions begin to build in Eastern Europe many years before the rise of the Revolutionaries in Spain, Franco, Archduke Ferdinand. 

ONE BIG UNION: IWW

III. Utah: A Murder at the Big Salt Lake

By the time Joe Hill made it across the long flat prairies of the edge of the Midwest, the battle of labor versus capital back East had flamed up into violent clashes in the streets the country over. Formerly trusted bastions of safety, police forces were shown starkly as who they are: handmaidens of the bourgeoise. Word of the fighting travelled with blacklisted workers to the young cities and towns out West. 

Joe Hill rode into Park City, Utah in the fall of 1913. There he joined a team of hardscrabble miners in the rocky foothills that the region is famous for. As usual, the most vulnerable of populations are desperate enough to take the dark, extremely dangerous conditions of the mines. (Dark as a Dungeon song link here). 

On the night of January 10, 1914, John G. Morrison and his son Arline were killed during a robbery of the family's store in Salt Lake. At the time, it was a convenient and natural progression to pin the blame on the upstart Labor organizers who'd recently shown up in town, looking for work in the mines.

Joe Hill was hunted down at the office of a local doctor, having shown up with a bullet wound through the left lung. Hill explained he'd been shot over an argument involving a woman, but would not name her and out an obvious Communist sympathizer within the Conservative Utah community. When a red bandana (like the ones worn by the two gunmen who'd killed the Morrison men) was found in his boarding house bedroom, he was pronounced guilty almost instantly. 

"Don't mourn. Organize."

Joe had no formal trial. The doctor who he'd seen in Salt Lake the night of the murder told authorities that he was in possession of a pistol on the night he'd come for care for a bullet wound in his leg, but no pistol was ever found. Additionally, there were rumors going around that Joe was shot over disagreements with locals since he was seeing a local young woman. 

When the firing squad was prepared to carry out the execution, it's reported that the accused shouted "Fire" himself after the normal formality of counting to two. He left his paltry belongings and a written Last Will and Testament, written in the form of a song.

IV. Last Will and Testament of Joe Hill

Source: Wikipedia - The Execution of Joe Hill

Joe Hill's Will Reads as Follows:

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 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

This is my favorite Joe Hill Song, he coined the 
phrase "Pie in the Sky", and called the Salvation Army
the "Starvation Army".

Utah Phillips also has a great version.

This is the first nonfiction entry in my blog "Lack County Stir", in the "Labor Leaders Remembered" Series documenting great leaders in our Country's Labor Movement at the turn of the 20th Century. Look for updates here every Month. 

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