Joe Hill: Union Organizer, Songwriter, Martyr to the Working Class and Possible Murderer

Joe Hill is one of those forgotten mythic figures of the American landscape. This is most likely because those in charge of creating American mythic figures would likely have been the target of Joe Hill's truth and his grapes of wrath. Pulling in grapes of wrath when discussing Joe Hill is apt. After all, Hill was a migrant worker before he became a hero to the oppressed working man.

Joe Hill was not born in America, but that never stopped corporate American from building up a mythic figure that symbolizes their ideology. It was in Sweden in 1879 that Joel Emmanuel Haaglund came into the world. Following the death of his mother in 1902, Joel set sail like so many immigrants to the shores of America where the Statue of Liberty welcomed him with a torch raised to guide those new Americans. Joel Haaglund was not well educated and so he quickly joined many of those other immigrants in mill conditions. But what most of those immigrants lacked, educated or not, was an instinctive skill for organizing other human beings. Joel was fired from a job in Chicago after committing the awful crime of attempting to organize his fellow workers to ensure them a lifestyle nowhere near as good as the owners of the company, but still enough to allow them to pay for food and take care of their families.

Itinerant wanderings around the miraculous landscape that is America led Joel in 1910 to join the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the IWW, otherwise known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies were proudly viewed as a radical organization intent on bettering the lives of those who sweat and blood put steak on the tables of the rich on a nightly basis. The goal of the Wobblies simple and clear: destroy that satanic part of the capitalist system that made the chasm between the rich and the poor even wider. Along the way, Joel began writing songs for a little piece of propaganda put out by the IWW called the Little Red Song Book. Tough to figure out what those who were not on the side of the workers hated more: Joel's organizing skills or the fact that he took beloved American mythic heroes like Casey Jones and revealed their story from the other side; a side that was pretty ugly. "Casey Jones: The Union Scab" has a title that pretty much says it all.

By 1913, the road well traveled by Joe Hill wound up in Utah. Leaving Utah became rather problematic for Joe after a mysterious murder took place on the evening of January 10, 1914. A teenage witness reported that two masked men had brought weapons with them to rob a grocer. Shots were fired and by the time the smoke cleared, the teenager's brother and father were dead and the masked men were nowhere to be found.

On that same night, Joe Hill showed up at a doctor's office with a bullet wound. His story was the bullet had arrived inside his body courtesy of an argument with an unnamed woman. Hill pleaded with the doctor to keep the story quiet. The doctor promised -- and then called the police a few days later.

That grocer had not been just any shopkeeper. He had once been a member of the police department and on more than occasion said he feared for his life from revenge plots of those whom he'd sent to jail. Meanwhile, after questioning Joe Hill, the police discovered that he had never even heard of the man. Nevertheless, the investigation immediately focused on Joe Hill and all those possible suspects whom the former police officer had arrested were ignored.

Joe Hill was not the only member of the Wobblies in Utah during those years. Utah had been the site of some rather bitter labor disputes between owners and workers and the Wobblies had been the instigator. The trial started off looking well for Joe Hill since even the DA admitted that the evidence against Hill was flimsy and circumstantial. The teenaged witness and three women who claimed to see a man running from the scene of the crime all failed to positively identify Joe Hill as one of the assailants. Well, at least that's what they said about six months before the trial began. Once the trial finally got underway, however, two of the female witnesses suddenly became absolutely certain that the man they had seen was Joe Hill.

The lack of strength in the prosecutor's case was equally balanced by the lack of strength in the defense. Joe Hill resolutely refused to admit where he had been and whom he had been with in that fight that resulted in a bullet to his body. Hill also tried to fire most of his defense team. That was the result of defense lawyers taking a rather lazy approach to cross examination. What really sealed Joe Hill's doom, however, was the judge, as it often seems to be in these cases. The instructions that the judge gave to the jury in Joe Hill's trial was such that Casey Anthony would have been found guilty on all counts after about two minutes of deliberation had the judge done the same in her case.

Joe Hill was convicted of murder and faced the option of execution through hanging or shooting. Saying that he was far more comfortable with being shot at than hanging, he opted for the gunfire. Over the course of the next year, Joe Hill appealed the verdict and in the process became something of a mythic hero himself. The Wobblies had successfully used Hill case to turn him into a martyr for the working class. Nevertheless, Joe Hill continued to keep the secret of his whereabouts the night of the shootings to himself. On November 19, 1915 Joe Hill faced a firing squad.