Hill, Joe

HILL, JOE (1879–1915). The most popular songwriter and most celebrated martyr of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as well as one of the union’s early cartoonists, Joe Hill was also very much a hobo and “lone wolf” and, as such, has long been the despair of biographers, for, as is generally true of migratory workers, very little is known of his life. He was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, of Swedish Lutheran parents. As a child, after his father’s death in 1887, he worked in a rope factory and as fireman on a steam-powered crane. In his teens he was stricken with tuberculosis and hospitalized in Stockholm. In 1902 he immigrated to the United States.

For the next eight years almost nothing is known of his doings except that he made his way across the continent working as a porter, harvest-hand, longshoreman, and at various other odd jobs. He lived in New York for a year, working on the Bowery, and in the course of his wanderings spent time in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, the Dakotas, Spokane, and Portland. In 1906 he wrote a firsthand account of the San Francisco earthquake that was published in his hometown paper in Sweden.

Exactly when and where Hill joined the IWW is not known (the union’s records were seized by the U.S. government in 1918 and later destroyed), but it seems to have been sometime in 1910, and possibly in San Pedro, California, where he lived for several years and served for a time as secretary of the IWW local. In 1911 he and other Wobblies took part in the Mexican Revolution in Baja, California, and in the following year we find him in British Columbia writing songs for strikers on the Canadian Northern railroad.

Hill contributed to the IWW cause primarily as wordsmith and artist rather than as organizer or soapboxer. He loved to draw (his home in Sweden, now the Joe Hill Museum, has an oil painting that he did as a young man), and his cartoons show that he carefully studied the work of such pioneering exemplars of the cartoonist’s art as F. B. Opper and Rube Goldberg. He played piano, accordion, guitar, and banjo, and clearly enjoyed the popular music of his day. He also had a natural ear for slang that gave his lyrics an added “punch.” The few articles that he wrote—such as his celebration of Wobbly sabotage, “How to Make Work for the Unemployed,” published in the International Socialist Review in December 1914—reveal the same qualities evidenced in his songs and cartoons: a vivid, overriding hobo humor, and an extraordinary ability to express revolutionary ideas with a simplicity as compelling as it is appealing. Hill’s first contribution to the IWW press, a letter to the editor, appeared in August 1910. His first song published in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook, “The Preacher and the Slave,” appeared in 1911. Another edition of the songbook, in 1912, carried his first Wobbly cartoon.

By mid-1913 Hill was one of the better-known Wobs, admired in IWW halls and hobo jungles and on picket lines throughout the land above all for his rousing “songs to fan the flames of discontent.” Hill’s songs, raucously comic ballads, mostly sung to popular tunes (“Casey Jones, the Union Scab,” “Mr. Block,” “Scissor Bill”) or revolutionary rewrites of old hymns (“The Preacher and the Slave,” “There Is Power in a Union,” “Stung Right”) quickly became Wobbly favorites; the union’s 1913 songbook contains many more songs by Hill than by anyone else.

His growing reputation as leading IWW bard did not go unnoticed by those he and his fellow workers recognized as their class enemies. In January 1914 he was arrested, near Salt Lake City, Utah, and charged with a murder that had taken place in the city several days earlier. Hill had no criminal record, no connection with the victim, no motive for the killing; moreover, none of several witnesses identified him as the man leaving the scene of the crime. But the police chief of San Pedro, who had once held Hill for thirty days on a charge of “vagrancy” because of his efforts to organize longshoremen, wrote to the Salt Lake police: “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.” Utah “public opinion,” dominated by the Copper Trust and the notoriously anti-union Mormon church, followed this cue in a case that nearly all historians have come to recognize as one of the worst travesties of justice in American history. After a trial riddled with biased rulings, suppression of important defense evidence, and other violations of judicial procedure characteristic of cases involving labor radicals, Hill was convicted and sentenced to death.

The IWW’s vigorous defense campaign, exposing the “frame-up” and demanding a new trial, won enormous support. The American Federation of Labor, the Swedish government, and even President Woodrow Wilson intervened on Hill’s behalf, but to no avail. On 19 November 1915, Hill faced the firing squad.

Shortly before his execution he wired IWW secretary-treasurer Bill Haywood, in Chicago: “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.” In shortened form—“Don’t mourn, organize!”—these became the most famous “famous last words” in U.S. labor history, and remain a battle cry not only for militant labor but for oppressed people throughout the world.

Many thousands had to be turned away from Hill’s funeral service in Chicago, and the throngs who filled the streets for blocks en route to the cemetery, lustily singing his songs all the way, made up one of the largest funeral processions in the city’s history. After his cremation, his ashes were divided into small printed packets and sent to fellow workers in every state except Utah, and in dozens of foreign countries, to be scattered on May Day 1916.

Hill was already something of a legend in the last months of his life, and his legend—as the Wobbly poet, the poet-organizer, and “the man who never died,” after a line in a 1925 poetic tribute by Alfred Hayes—has steadily grown ever since. Honored in novels, short stories, films, plays, poems, songs, and the plastic arts, as well as in several biographies and collections of his work, he has long since entered popular consciousness as a folk hero like Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed. It was above all as a songwriter, however, that Joe Hill was best known in his lifetime, and his songs—recorded by many well-known singers and still popular on picket lines today—remain his greatest legacy.

Foner, Philip. The Case of Joe Hill. New York: International Publishers, 1965.

Foner, Philip, ed. The Letters of Joe Hill. New York: Oak, 1965.

Kokk, Enn, ed. The Complete Joe Hill Song Book. Stockholm: Prisma, 1969.

Nolan, Dean, and Fred Thompson. Joe Hill: IWW Songwriter. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1979.

Rosemont, Franklin. Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2002.

Rosemont, Franklin, ed. The Cartoons of Joe Hill. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1992.

Smith, Gibbs M. Joe Hill. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1984.

PBS Utah. Joe Hill. 2000. https://www.pbsutah.org/whatson/kued-productions/joe-hill

The Songs of Joe Hill. Folk Archive. http://www.folkarchive.de/hill.html