By Slobodan Dimitrov, Guest Columnist
Blindfolded, Joe Hill sits in a chair with his wrists tied to its arms. Riflemen, apprehensively peering through slits at Hill from behind a barricade, hold their weapons knuckle-white tight. Blindfolded, Hill starts rocking his chair and yelling “I want to see.” He rocks his chair until it tilts back, leaning against a structure behind him. He rubs his face against it, sliding off the blindfold. Hill stares at the slits behind which the rifle nest is hid. Some of the rifles are loaded with dum-dum bullets — expandable bullets that are designed to inflict greater damage than the rifle’s caliber would suggest. Murmuring several words, Hill stares at the wall of anonymity in front of him. Finally, after a deep look, in a pique of defiance, Hill utters “fire.” The firing squad reflexively does so. So dies Joe Hill, according to the scene painted in a 1971 Swedish biopic, directed by Bo Widerberg (of Elvira Madigan fame, 1967).
It is also this scene of martyrdom that community members, folk singers and labor leaders paid tribute to during a Jan. 28 dedication ceremony of the Joe Hill Memorial Plaque—a work by graphic artist Suzanne Matsumiya and nationally renowned sculptor, Eugene Daub.
More than 100 people gathered at Liberty Hill Plaza at the foot of 5th Street on Harbor Boulevard to celebrate San Pedro’s adopted son and sing Joe Hill’s IWW songs about the struggles of the working man.
Art Almeida, the noted historian of San Pedro’s occupational culture who spearheaded the project to make the memorial possible, followed the performance by explaining the symbols embedded in the plaque.
He began by identifying the location of old Beacon Street, which had been torn down and restructured over the past three decades of redevelopment efforts. He continued by explaining the location of the hill upon which Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the Bill of Rights in 1924 (he only made it part-way through the first). Almeida then explained the location of the jail in which Hill sat for his organizing activities in San Pedro, more than 10 years prior to the emergence of Sinclair.
“Upton Sinclair was not a Wobbly,” Almeida said “The fact is, he had some funny ideas about organizing, but the one thing he liked about the Wobblies was their songs, their themes and their freedom of speech.”
Joe Hill died Nov. 19, 1915. Some say he was murdered by official fiat, others say he got his comeuppance. In either case, Joe Hill very quickly became an icon of labor’s struggle to improve worker conditions. His martyrdom became a symbol of the inviolate individual, braving the forces of the robber barons who reigned unchecked. Joe Hill became the archetypal image of defiance in the face of adversity.
While the circumstances surrounding his last days are clouded with assumptions, William M. Adler’s 2011 biography on Hill, The Man Who Never Died, reveals evidence that Hill’s charges and conviction were the result of a love triangle gone wrong—specifically, he was shot by a close friend and rival for the affections of Hilda Erickson. The young woman was a member of the family with whom both men were lodging.
Subsequent events used the wound that Hill sustained as proof for another set of circumstances: the 1914 killing of John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City grocer and former policeman, and his son, L. Arling Morrison, by two men. The Erickson alibi was never presented in court, according to Adler, setting in motion a train of events that would culminate in the execution of an obscure labor activist.
Obscurity was never going to be the platter upon which Joe Hill’s ashes would rest. His ashes were placed in 600 envelopes and distributed throughout the world. More pointedly, Hill’s last act of defiance would be a note that resonated through generations to come—a heraldic voice of the struggle for justice, an acknowledgment of the contribution that a person can make to occupational and national culture. It should be noted that many died at the hands of extra-judicial methods prevalent during the turn of that century. A few have stood out, such as the 1886 Haymarket Affair; the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911; and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. None, however, have captured the imagination like Joe Hill.
While a simple man, Hill left a copious amount of literary work. By the standards of the day for someone involved in the labor movement, Hill was prodigious. The letters, songs, and cartoons, allow us today to know him in a manner that resonates. As a symbol of the labor movement, Joe Hill projects the “good fight” with a natural grace and unaffected directness that is seldom seen nowadays.
Labor culture is split into two courses of action: one which reaches into the trenches of the “good fight;” and the other which mimics a corporate style used to engage and dialogue with Management. Both are valid and comingle, as historic national events show. Joe Hill is a product of the “good fight” from inside our economic steerage.
Born Oct. 7, 1879 as Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, Hill was also attributed another name, Joseph Hillström, on his Industrial Workers of the World documents, which was shortened to Hill. The “future troubadour of discontent” emigrated to the United States in 1902, with his brother Paul, after their father died. They worked across the country at various jobs—often menial and underpaid.
According to the AFL-CIO, “The record finds him … in San Pedro, Calif., in 1910. There he joined the IWW, served for several years as the secretary for the San Pedro local and wrote many of his most famous songs, including The Preacher and the Slave and Casey Jones—A Union Scab. His songs, appearing in the IWW’s Little Red Song Book, addressed the experience of virtually every major IWW group from immigrant factory workers to homeless migratory workers to railway shopcraft workers.
“The San Pedro dockworkers’ strike led to Hill’s first recorded encounter with the police, who arrested him in June 1913 and held him for 30 days on a charge of vagrancy because, he said later, he was ‘a little too active to suit the chief of the burg’ during the strike.”
During his time in San Pedro he wrote the majority of his songs and drew cartoons for the IWW. Many would be taken up by folk singers. Hill was chiefly popularized through the following song, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, written by Alfred Hays and Earl Robinson, circa 1936. It was often sung by the likes of Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs. From 1911 to 1915, Hill wrote 24 songs.
The role of the song can’t be underscored enough. It was a new organizing technology for its day. Along with radio, it could advance the call to action among the workers. The IWW was known as the singing union, and Joe Hill’s songs were auditory demonstration signs. Wobblies would often sing them, in prisons, while under arrest for civil disobedience.
Joe Hill was no stranger to singing. According to his biography on the AFL-CIO site, “Both his parents enjoyed music and often led the family in song. As a young man, Hill composed songs about members of his family, attended concerts at the workers’ association hall in Gävle, Sweden, and played piano in a local café.”
During the IWW strike in San Pedro, 1923, a labor journalist, Louis Adamic also worked on the docks in San Pedro.
“While the strike was thus being broken, the Wobblies—rough, strong men; native-born and foreigners—sang their songs,” Adamic said. “They sang in the prison stockade in San Pedro and on the way to the trains, in the trains and finally in jail… ‘God!’ another young newspaper man remarked to me, ‘One feels like singing with them. They got guts!’”
IWW song books during the 1910s sold anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 per printing. The songs, as one goes through Hill’s repertoire were an education, a morality journey to effect a change. They were meant to stir the individual to action by provoking thought and heart. By providing examples and ironies of what it meant to work for a near-living, while grasping for that elusive pie in the sky.
Many of the songs reached into the native cultures of the workers, adding a connectivity that touched deeply into the hearts of the working class. Hill’s song, The Preacher and the Slave was one of those songs.