Joe Hill and the violent suppression of American radicals

Unpublished, November 1990

Just after sunrise on a bleak November morning seventy five years ago, five men in uniform stood in line in the exercise yard of Utah State Penitentiary near Salt Lake City, raised rifles to their shoulders, took aim at a solitary figure tied up against the wall and shot him to death.

And so far as the mine owners and the politicians and the press barons of Utah were concerned, that was the end of Joe Hill – song-writer, striker, revolutionary, poet and pain in their corporate neck. Of course, they were wrong.

The big men of Utah may have had no doubts about the story of Joe Hill: he was just some louse-riddled Swedish trouble-maker who had bummed his way from one dumb job to another, got himself mixed up in a couple of strikes and then turned to crime in search of an easy life, and, in their eyes, he richly deserved five bullets in the chest for murdering a Salt Lake City grocer and his son during an attempted armed robbery.

But to American radicals, the death of Joe Hill on November 19 1915 told a different tale. For them, he was the uncowed voice of the Industrial Workers of the World, the revolutionary trade union universally known as The Wobblies; his defiant songs were sung on picket lines from the timber forests of the west coast to the docks and textile factories of the north east; he was an innocent man framed and murdered by a corrupt judiciary who feared the power of his poetry; he was their martyr.

Seventy five years later, Joe Hill, the Wobbly poet, is still frustrating the death wish of his executioners. Paul Robeson and Joan Baez have sung about him. Films, books, poems and posters have celebrated him. His name is indelibly linked to his legendary title, The Man Who Never Died.

This anniversary year, the power of the legend is reflected in memorial gatherings, free concerts, a film festival, essay-writing contests for school children, and a three-day labour conference in Salt Lake City this weekend. The legend has gathered special power for contemporary Wobblies who have survived the years to link up with radical Green groups in California only to be suppressed with the kind of bone-cracking violence which colours the legend of Joe Hill.

However, the most striking thing about Joe Hill is not so much that he has achieved this status, as the fact that he has done so with almost no assistance from the facts. His story has abandoned history and taken refuge in myth. It was the violence which made it happen.

The Industrial Workers of the World struck the United States in the heart of its ideology. From their birth in Chicago in 1905, the Wobblies attacked the very idea of capitalism, demanded the abolition of the wage system and called on all workers regardless of their nationality or colour or sex to join the One Big Union and fight together for revolution. Their formal membership was never very great – 100,000 at most. Their strength lay in their ability to organise workers who had been ignored by mainstream unions – women, blacks, farmhands, loggers, longshoremen.

Their leaders had all the charisma of natural individualists: Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed bull-necked miner who founded the Wobblies and inspired them with his oratory; Mother Jones, who was descended from six generations of Irish rebels and became a heroine among striking miners; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who led strikes in the textile mills, was repeatedly arrested at free speech gatherings and became the subject of Joe Hill’s poem, The Rebel Girl.

Like American radicals in the 1960s, they drew strength from their sheer energy, their unstructured, unorthodox, unstoppable will to win, free of the kind of ideological disputes and bureaucratic lethargy of more established movements. “Allelujah! I’m a bum,” they chanted. “Drop the bosses off your back.” The FBI and the new generation of American corporations replied with a barrage of posters and cartoon films denouncing them as lawless anarchists and radical fungus’, and with violence.

When The Wobblies organised their biggest strike – among the textile mills of Massachusetts in 1912 – the Governor declared martial law and called in mounted police with clubs to break up open air meetings. When the Wobblies challenged a ban on their meetings in Everett, Washington by shipping in a boat load of 300 ‘footloose Wobs’, the local sheriff ordered his men to open fire, killing five of them and wounding fifty others on the quayside. Around the USA, Wobblies were arrested for vagrancy, jailed for sedition, kidnapped and beaten, tarred and feathered.

Frank Little, who was probably the most effective Wobbly leader, organised the copper miners of Arizona and Montana during 1916 to fight wage cuts. The mining companies hated him. One night, six masked men broke into his room in Butte, Montana, beat him, hauled out him out into the street, roped him to the back of a car and dragged him off into the woods where they hanged him and stuck a notice on his battered corpse: “First and last warning”. No-one was ever arrested for his murder.

It was the same with Wesley Everest, a Wobbly ex-soldier who joined a strike against the lumber companies in Centralia, Washington. The lumber bosses openly warned the Wobblies that they were going to run them out of town. There was a violent brawl between Wobblies and vigilantes hired by the companies. Both sides were armed. Wesley Everest was blamed for killing a vigilante and thrown in jail. That night, with the town lights switched off, the vigilantes came and broke him out of his cell, castrated him on the floor of their car and then hanged him from the bridge over the Chevalis River and used his body for target practice.

From time to time, the Wobblies won. But the violence and the jailings slowly wore them down. They never recovered from a trial in Chicago in September 1917 when 165 of them were accused of hindering the war effort and given heavy jail sentences. Big Bill Haywood himself was jailed for 20 years, although he escaped to the Soviet Union where he died in 1928, a broken man. It was in the midst of this spiraling cycle of rebellion and repression that Joe Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City.

According to the police, he and another, unidentified man had tried to rob a grocer’s store but the grocer had pulled a gun and, in the ensuing exchange of fire, Hill had been shot in the left arm before killing the grocer, John Morrison, and his 17-year-old son, Alving.

The most damning evidence against Hill was the fact that on the night of the robbery he was certainly shot. In addition, his room mate, Otto Applequist, who was suspected of being his partner in crime, had disappeared that night without explanation. It then transpired that Applequist had himself been shot and wounded a year before on the same night that there had been an earlier robbery at Morrison’s grocery store.

But the case against Hill was fundamentally weak. Witnesses to the shooting failed to identify him. There was no scientific evidence to link him to the crime. He explained that his bullet wound was nothing to do with any robbery. The truth, he said, was, that he had been having an affair with a married woman in Salt Lake City and had been shot by her husband; he refused to name the woman for fear of exposing her to public shame. In support of his story, he pointed out that the bullet which had wounded him had passed through his body and yet, despite hours of close scrutiny, the police were unable to find any trace of it at the scene of the crime. This, he said, proved that he had been shot elsewhere. The bullethole in his jacket turned out to be four inches higher than the hole in his body, and this, he said, proved that he had been shot with his hands up, as the irate husband came towards him. He insisted that he was simply a poet whose only offence was to carry a little red IWW membership card.

The Wobblies rallied to his defence. They were enraged by the campaign against Hill in the local Utah press. They complained that the new state Governor was merely fulfilling his election promise to ‘sweep out IWW agitators’. They hired an attorney for him and appealed to the rest of the labour movement for help. They got it.

The British section of the IWW called for his release. A mass meeting of 30,000 Australian workers repeated the call. Utah newspapers were handling 50 protest letters a day. After being visited by Elizabeth Gurley Flynnn, President Woodrow Wilson himself intervened to ask the Utah authorities to reconsider the case. But Hill was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad.

As the date of Hill’s execution approached, word of his cool courage inspired a new wave of respect and anger. He wrote poems and newspaper articles, impressed his lawyer who said he had never seen a man face certain death so calmly, stunned a hostile local reporter who interviewed him on the day before he died and found all his hostility abated, and finally sent Big Bill Haywood a last telegram in which he sealed his reputation as a labour hero with the words: “Goodbye, Bill. I die a true blue rebel. Don’t waste time in mourning. Organise!”

But was he really an innocent man murdered by the bosses to silence his radical voice? American labour historians have combed out the story of Joe Hill in every corner of the nation in search of the truth and, although it will always remain a matter of opinion, they have found enough evidence to support the conclusion that, although Hill’s trial may have been prejudiced and unfair, he was quite possibly guilty of the crime for which he died.

They found, for example, that he had been arrested for armed robbery before – two years earlier in California – and that he was well-known in Wobbly circles for being ‘a stick-up man’ and that, although he was unemployed, he invariably had money in his pocket. They found no trace of an alternative culprit for the robbery, no innocent explanation for the disappearance of his roommate and no sign at all of the anonymous lover or her irate husband, but they did discover from eye witnesses that the robber had been wounded as he stretched over the grocer’s counter to shoot 17-year-old Alving where he cowered on the floor – a position which would explain why the hole in Joe Hill’s jacket did not match the hole in his body.

It also became clear that, although Hill was certainly famous in his time as a song-writer, there was no reason for the Utah mine owners to kill him since he was barely involved in Wobbly activity there, and that there was no evidence that the mine owners had pressurised the jury at his trial nor that they had pressurised the police who, it transpired, had arrested twelve other suspects before their attention was drawn to Hill by the doctor who treated his bullet wound.

None of this proves that Joe Hill was guilty of murder. Nor does it effect his personal courage in facing execution. But it does suggest that the power behind his legendary status is not simply anger at a brazen miscarriage of justice. The real force behind the myth of Joe Hill, which has lifted it well clear of factual debate, is the desperation of American radicals to survive the violent repression they have suffered. This repression has been discreetly airbrushed out of the official picture of life in the Land of the Free. Its more extreme moments – McCarthyism being the obvious example – may be acknowledged but the recurrant role of official violence in suppressing radicalism is recognised only at the margins, at the level of folk history. Which is where Joe Hill remains a vivid figure.

If Joe Hill did not truly exist as a martyred hero, it was natural to invent him. If the Wobblies and other radicals over the years could not in reality survive the vicious jail sentences and beatings and lynchings, they could at least keep the faith by believing in the legend of The Man Who Never Died.

The making of the legend began while Hill was on trial. It gathered pace immediately after his death with an exercise which turned out to be full of potent symbolism.

In a rhyming will, Joe Hill declared that he should be cremated and he asked that his ashes should be scattered in every state in the union – except for Utah because, as he agreed with Big Bill Haywood, he “would not want to be found dead in Utah”. The FBI, however, decided to block the plan and as the Wobblies mailed out Joe Hill’s last message to the American working class, their special agents moved into the post offices to confiscate them on the grounds that the dead poet’s remains were seditious material. Despite the fact that each package was clearly marked “Joe Hill, murdered by the capitalist class”, the FBI missed most of them and succeeded in taking only one small vial back to the Department of Justice in Washington DC, where they locked it up in a safe in the basement where it could do no harm.

The symbolism lies not merely in the state’s determination to pursue radicalism even beyond the grave, but also in the sequel which finally saw this repression rekindle the defiance which it was trying to crush. For seventy three years later, some of Ronald Reagan’s bureaucrats found the ashes in the archives, ruled that sufficient time had now passed for them safely to be returned and, since Hill had no traceable family, they decided to send them back to the surviving Wobblies who still guard the flame of revolution in a shabby little office in the shadow of the Chicago baseball stadium.

The contemporary Wobblies, for their part, still true to their traditions of direct democracy, asked their members what they should do with this souvenir. Some wanted to raffle them to raise money for strike funds; others wanted to scatter them from a helicopter over George Bush’s inauguration; one Wobbly supporter, the former Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, proposed that they should nominate a dozen activists who would each swallow a spoonful of Joe Hill, agree that on their death they, too, would be cremated and then repeat the process. In the end, they decided to scatter the remains on symbolic locations, including the grave of Frank Little, spreading the legend a little further.

This year, the Wobblies joined forces with radical environmental groups to organise the Redwood Summer in California, a campaign which is aimed at protecting the redwood forests from strip-logging by lumber companies and modeled on the Mississippi Summer which challenged southern racists in the 1960s with direct action. The Wobblies and their allies have been sitting in the tops of condemned trees, blockading logging tracks, dismantling bulldozers, chaining themselves to cranes, picketing, suing and lobbying.

After a while, they started getting death threats through the post. Someone opened up with a shotgun at one of their meetings. One of their cars was run off the road by a logging truck. Just before midday on May 24, two of the leaders of the coalition were injured when a bomb exploded in their car. Defiance is dangerous in the USA.