Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World

Joe Hill was born Joel Emanuel Hagglund on October 7, 1879, in Gavle, Sweden. At age 22, in 1901, Joel migrated to the United States, where he changed his name to Joseph Hillstrom, then simply, to Joe Hill. Eventually, Hill ended up in California, where he worked as a longshoreman loading and unloading ships at the docks near Los Angeles. In 1910, Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the radical labor union known as the Wobblies. The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905 by William “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, Eugene Debs, and disgruntled workers from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW defined itself as “one big union” that brought together workers from various trades; the Wobblies used direct action tactics, including some violence; and unlike the AFL, the IWW completely rejected the entire capitalist system. By 1923, the IWW claimed 100,000 members, but by the late 1920s, after concerted harassment and persecution by state and federal government agents nationwide, the Wobblies were brought to their knees.

Joe Hill was an untrained, but very talented songwriter and guitar player. He used his abilities to parody popular songs, turning tunes every American knew into satirical but also hopeful propaganda songs for the IWW. Many of Hill’s songs are found in the Wobbly song book “I.W.W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent,” which became known universally as “the little red song book.” Hill liked particularly to rip off the tunes to songs sung by the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army was an IWW rival, because both groups were, as one writer put it, “after the same souls—the homeless, uprooted migratory and unemployed workers of the western towns.” The Wobblies often performed Hill’s versions of Salvation Army songs, such as his “The Preacher and the Slave,” on street corners in Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Consider one of the ringing passages in that song : “ If you fight hard for children and wife/ Try to get something good in this life/ You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell/ When you die you will sure go to hell.” Hill felt that one of the important, yet forgotten issues in the struggles of working class men was that they had families to support.

In Salt Lake, Joe Hill was arrested for a murder he claimed to know nothing about. Although President Wilson and thousands of others pleaded with the state of Utah to reconsider, Hill was shot before a firing squad in November, 1915. “Scholars still debate Hill’s guilt or innocence,” a leading western historian has written, “but his telegram to Haywood just before his execution (‘Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.’) sealed his place in the pantheon of American radical heroes.”

1. Look in your newspaper for stories about labor and work in the West, past or present. Do the workers depicted in labor-related articles sound like they might sympathize or diagree with Joe Hill and the Wobblies? Who are the working class in the West today? What are their jobs? What problems do workers today experience, and how do they approach solutions?

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