Executed by Firing Squad 100 Years Ago, Joe Hill’s Spirit Still Lives
By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Nov. 19 marks the centennial of Joe Hill’s execution by firing squad in the state of Utah. The state said he was guilty of a double murder. But, he was actually killed because he was a Wobbly. The authorities of that era would throw all sorts of charges at the Wobblies to see which ones would stick.
I was thinking about Joe Hill partially because a group of San Pedro artists, labor historians and volunteers, called the Joe Hill Memorial Committee, are organizing a commemorative event in November to celebrate Hill’s life and work. As a labor icon, Hill’s legend has only grown since his death.
Another reason Joe Hill and the Wobblies have been on my mind these past few weeks is the ongoing debate about homelessness in San Pedro and the level of incivility accompanying this debate. Social media has become a platform for throwing proverbial smoke signals for the natives to gather rocks, clubs and lynching ropes both in a real and in a figurative sense. At least that’s the impression that’s been made in preparation for the Sept. 3, San Pedro forum on homelessness.
I recently asked a Joe Hill Memorial Committee member and this town’s official labor historian, Art Almeida, why remembering Hill is important at this period in time.
“I suppose [it’s about] observing the centennial of Joe being with us and [show] that he hasn’t been forgotten,” Almeida replied. “He’s as much alive today as he was 100 years ago. Surprisingly, a lot of people don’t know much about him. But that’s what happens with history. Things sort of just fade away.”
When the Wobblies, otherwise known as the Industrial Workers of the World, formed in 1905, its founders envisioned a bigger and more inclusive union of the entire working class. This movement didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built on the experience of a class of people who had been exploited and used up by industrial capitalism. They found a version of socialism, the idea of the One Big Union, to be a natural detour around capitalism’s inequities.
Harry Bridges, the founder of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, was a Wobbly for a short while during the early years of the IWW. He didn’t stay in that union, but he was profoundly influenced by it and it affected how the ILWU was built. It was from the Wobblies that the idea, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” emerged.
Back in January of this year, thousands of Los Angeles Harbor Area residents rallied on Harbor Boulevard in support of the ILWU during the darkest moments of the contract negotiations. The rally represented all strata of San Pedro. Business owners and wage earners, elected officials and civic leaders, homeowners and residents of public housing all marched in those streets.
It was a moment in which the entire community stood behind the union as the Pacific Maritime Association was cutting nighttime and holiday shifts, all the while blaming the union for the backup of unloaded shipping containers.
Whether anybody knew it or not, Joe Hill’s spirit was alive and well that night.
San Pedro wasn’t always that open to Hill’s Wobbly spirit. William Adler’s definitive biography on Joe Hill, The Man Who Never Died, and Almeida’s Wobblies in San Pedro, reminded me of that.
A Swede, Hill landed in New York at the age of 23—three years before the Industrial Workers of the World formed. While little is known about Hill’s whereabouts between the time he arrived in the United States in 1902 and 1905, Hill was already a singer and songwriter, with a gift for playing a variety of musical instruments, when he arrived.
What is known is that he was in Cleveland, Ohio in 1905, in San Francisco during the 1906, earthquake and he was a resident of San Pedro in 1910.
During the three years he lived in San Pedro, Hill wrote some of his most well-known songs: “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Casey Jones—A Union Scab.”
His songs, appearing in the Wobblies’ Little Red Song Book, addressed the experience of virtually every major Industrial Workers of the World group, from immigrant factory workers to homeless migratory workers to workers on the railroad.
His music influenced generations of folk artists, including Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and others, who wrote songs that told of the common man’s struggles.
Hill was also a reflection of the people he wrote about in his songs. He was the secretary of San Pedro’s IWW local strike committee and a veteran of the rebel forces during the Mexican Revolution. He also squatted in a tar-papered shack on the docks, which was much like the tiny houses that are causing such an uproar among San Pedro residents these days.
The Wobblies would probably not look too different from the homeless today, except for the fact that much of the unskilled jobs connected to industrial capitalism are gone. The Wobblies were foreign-born, transient, uneducated and to a certain degree, rootless because they went wherever there was work.
In fact, Wobblies’ practiced a meat-and-potatoes kind of unionism. Theirs was an activism that fought private employment agencies that were taking advantage of the unemployed. Theirs was an activism that fought free speech battles in the face of local government attempts to censor their speech.
Local governments, the chambers of commerce, religious institutions, and employer-operated dispatch halls were the forces against the union.
Anti-vagrancy and anti-syndicalism were the laws arrayed against them. Trumping up and manufacturing charges was another tool. If that didn’t work, police allowed or encouraged vigilante attacks on Wobblies. The most significant example is the 1924 raid on the Wobblie hall on 12th and Centre streets, where a dozen or so Wobblies were beaten, and several were tarred, feathered and driven out of town.
Though I have yet to come across a lynching in San Pedro, in that era, it was not an uncommon sight for a Wobbly or other “undesirables” to be strung up by a noose in California. In many respects, the way we treat our undesirables has not changed all that much.
Still Waiting for `One Big Union’
Today, the hobos, transients and squatters are still treated as “undesirables.”
In recent years, the undesirables has become more visible. Social media has become the place where social violence is perpetrated, and sometimes, that violence manifests in the streets.
Case in point: Well before the emergence of the tiny homes project, the rising visibility of homelessness already had San Pedro’s attention—particularly with homeless encampments between Beacon and Palos Verdes streets, and between 8th and 10th streets. A photo that was widely shared on social media of an encampment in front of the now-closed Antes Restaurant on Palos Verde Street, caused anxiety and prompted police action. Within a couple of weeks, Councilman Joe Buscaino ordered the encampment cleared, following 72-hour notices. Buscaino got Facebook kudos, and his face on television and in newspapers as an elected who was doing his job. At least, until the encampments came back.
As these makeshift homesteads gained media attention, the social media vitriol increased.
The first of the tiny houses was completed on July 25. Sources told me that within 24 hours, the occupant was beaten by unknown assailants and his home was destroyed. But in the following weeks, several more tiny homes were built.
In August, the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council voted to turn an ad hoc committee on homelessness into a standing committee. The neighborhood council voted unanimously to support—in concept—the tiny homes project.
During that same month, Helping the Homeless In Need volunteers, the group responsible for the upcropping of tiny homes, reported assaults by rock-throwing assailants amid increased harassment by opponents of the project.
When the housing bubble burst in 2007, leading to a global recession, millions of homeowners became renters, and those already financially on the brink became desperate. I received anecdotal reports from service providers of middle class people showing up at the local food pantries to stock their shelves, and going to the local community clinic to replenish available medication.
At the time, fewer cargo containers were moving through the ports. Therefore, there were fewer shifts available on the docks. Annette McDonald, a longshore worker who is now aide to Rep. Janice Hahn’s campaign for Los Angeles County supervisor, had founded Hands Open Wide with Toberman Neighborhood Center to deliver groceries to casual longshore workers who were working only once every couple of months.
I bring this up because I don’t recall a great deal of distinction being made between the deserving and the undeserving poor at the time.
Today, however, the solution that a few Facebook activists have to offer in dealing with homelessness include chasing the homeless with continuous sweeps until they either leave or don’t want to be homeless anymore.
Common refrains on social media include: “People who give money to panhandlers are enablers;” “People who purchase food for the homeless are naive;” “People who help the homeless are attracting more homeless like flies to garbage.”
This town still has Joe Hill’s spirit, and has adopted the “Injury to one is an injury to all” Wobbly ethos. But there certainly exists today still some of the same fervor that drove Joe Hill out of San Pedro 100 years ago—into a Utah firing squad.