Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh sure, just as easy as not.”

  The forty dollars that Lund took from his wallet was more than he could spare; he would be short by the time he got home. But he would not do less. Seeing the surprise flick in Ricket’s black eyes at the amount, he said, “This is a debt. This really belongs to Joe already, I owe it to him. I’ll send on a contribution of my own after I get back east.”

  He knew that Ricket’s insistence on the receipt was a recognition of his difference and his status as an outsider, a “sympathizer.” Ricket would demonstrate that the IWW was punctilious and that there was not the slightest chance of graft in its collection of defense funds. Though he had never believed otherwise, Lund submitted to being receipted. When the slip was in his hands he said, “How did Joe behave this afternoon?”

  “Well,” Ricket said, and his eyes looked beyond Lund and his mouth twitched in the phantom smile. “He didn’t fire any more lawyers.”

  “Are Scott and McDougall as bad as he says?”

  “They’re all right. He never gave them anything to work with.”

  Ricket heaved back in the chair, found two cigars in a drawer, offered one to Lund, who refused. He bit off the end and sat absently, the smile coming and going, his brows in a webbed frown. For an aimless half-minute he tried carefully to get the cigar band onto his little finger, but could slip it only as far as the second knuckle.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and yawned powerfully, cracking his jaws. “Scott’s been on half a dozen labor cases here, he’s all right. McDougall’s new in town. But Joe don’t even want Hilton.”

  “He told me he didn’t want the union to bleed its treasury.”

  “Yeah,” Ricket said. “But before he got in this jam himself he was busting a gut raising money for the defense of the Oatfield boys. No, I’ve watched Joe on this from the beginning. He didn’t fire those two because they were doing a bad job. He fired them because he didn’t want anybody defending him at all.”

  “Some people might take that as a sign he’s guilty.”

  “Or extra innocent,” Ricket said. He smoked thoughtfully and watched Lund with eyes that seemed pure liquid. His voice was gentle. “Did you ever get hauled into jail?”

  “No.”

  The secretary dropped his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling, and the ghostly smile like a tightening of the jaw muscles or a gritting of the teeth came mirthlessly and went again. “I remember the first time I ever got pulled,” he said. “I was just a kid, maybe sixteen, and I was on the bum in a strange town—Denver, if it matters any. So I was rubbering around the streets looking for a YMCA when a cop spotted me, and finally he came up and said he guessed he better look me over. He searched me and found a jackknife I had, one with a button on the handle that springs the blade out, you know? Bingo, I’m in the clink, concealed weapons. It was that button jigger that did it. The cop booked me and took me on down a hall and shoved me through a door, and on the other side I land of hesitated, you know, the way you would, not knowing which way he wanted you to go. But I never got my mouth open to ask, because this bull let me have it across the face with his billy. I saw stars for about an hour, and after that I laid all night in the tank thinking over my sins. In the morning I was so swelled up, like a punkin all across this side, that they finally brought in a sawbones to look me over. Busted cheekbone. I kept wanting them to wire my folks in Sioux Falls, but they didn’t pay me any mind. They made it plenty clear how I could get a year for that jackknife if they wanted to be tough, and they kept inviting me to confess any robberies or anything I’d been mixed up in. They even pretended they had me all hooked up with one special job, but I was too dumb innocent to know what went on. Finally I got a probation officer to wire my old man, and after three days I got out of there.”

  Lund waited. “Yes?”

  “I was just thinking how helpless they can make you feel,” Ricket said. “You’re minding your own business and right out of a clear sky comes this tough mick in a blue suit and he can pull any damn thing on you he wants. He can murder you if he feels like it, beat you plumb to death, and the rest of them will cover up for him like a horse blanket. You can’t open your peep. Just squawk once, or even break step going through a door, and he can bust you with a club. If you look cross-eyed you’re resisting an officer, or trying to escape. And then they get you up before some sergeant and start firing questions at you, and there’s something about a jail makes everything you say sound like a lie, even to yourself. In five minutes they got you thinking you probably are some gonoph. You tell ’em where to find out about you and will they do it? They’d let you rot in jail for a week before they’d even send a wire.”

  “Yes,” Lund said again.

  “I think I can figure Joe out,” Ricket said. “Suppose you’re him, and you get hurt—how, that’s your business. You’re lying in bed when the cops come and pinch you. If they can make me feel the way I did about the jackknife, how could they make Joe feel about a double murder? Would you talk for them? Even if it meant your neck, would you let them beat some alibi out of you?”

  Knowing Joe, Lund admitted to himself that it could be that way. He was stubborn and he was proud.

  “Even hiring a lawyer to defend him is playing their game, see?” Ricket said. “Once he got really sore he’d feel that way, wouldn’t he?” With a sudden harsh movement he flapped the cigar ash onto the floor. “A working stiff like Joe hasn’t got any old man in Sioux Falls to wire to. Maybe you don’t know how the cops take it out on somebody they think hasn’t got any friends.”

  “Maybe Joe doesn’t want the IWW to spend its money because he thinks it isn’t properly an IWW case.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He couldn’t have been on union business when he was shot.”

  “Why not?” Ricket said. “That woman story could easy be something he got up on the spur of the moment. He could easy have been on union business.” He batted at the smoke cloud and twisted in the chair. “What you have to keep in mind all the time is that he’s a Wobbly. That’s enough for the boys that are after him. Ever since Haywood tried to organize Bingham two years ago the Copper Trust has been looking for a chance. Last fall we struck the Utah Construction Company down at Soldier’s Summit, on the D & RG. That puts the Utah Construction Company and the D & RG right where the Copper Trust is. This is a labor-hating state. If they can’t beat us or run us out they’ll frame us.”

  Ricket’s thesis was so simple, so comforting in its directness, that for a moment Lund was tempted. It made such a close neat pattern:

  the bosses catching a labor organizer off balance and pinning the handiest unexplained crime on him. Sometimes the formula varied, the bosses first having the crime committed and then framing a labor man. And both variants were often enough true; it would solve a lot of questions to believe one or another of them true this time. And certainly that would be the official IWW version, spread through the labor press. The printer in the canvas apron was probably setting up something of the kind now.

  But there were hesitancies, impediments to belief. “I’ve gone through the newspapers files,” he said. “They don’t say a word about Joe’s connection with the IWW. The reporters there this morning didn’t even know Joe had written any songs. He’s been in jail five months, but so far as I can see they still think they’ve got a common laborer named Hillstrom. They don’t know they’ve got Joe Hill.”

  The ghost smile became real, stretching the wide limber lips. “The newspaper boys don’t tell anything they’re not supposed to tell. Maybe they knew who Joe was and maybe they didn’t. But the bosses did.”

  “What bosses?” Lund said impatiently. “Have you got any evidence of that?”

  Ricket only smiled, and Lund understood him. If there was no evidence, the statement could still be made—must be made, as part of the campaign. “Anyway they know now,” Ricket said after a pause. “They were around here this afternoon and I gave
them an earful.” With a big brass-capped advertising pencil he jabbed at the scarred desk. “Every stiff in the West knows Joe Hill from his songs. In a week or two every stiff in the West’ll know he’s being railroaded. You watch the support roll in.”

  More than ever Lund felt himself an outsider, a pale doubting Thomas. The rest of them, from Ingrid Olson and Ricket to the most nameless stiff who sent in a dollar bill in a penciled envelope, were united in a single uncomplicated act of trying to save Joe. Trying to understand (trying to judge? he wondered) he was all alone, useless, perhaps even disloyal.

  “Is Mrs. Stephen part of the campaign?” he asked.

  “You bet she is. She’s a worker, that girl, and she’s got connections.”

  “Her connections have already got her talked about.”

  Ricket’s laugh was loud and full of amusement, oddly hearty after the ghostly flickering smile. “Did you see tonight’s Deseret News?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not a peep,” Ricket said. “Daughter of former president of Mormon Church mixed up in murder trial? Unh-uh. Not in the Church’s paper.”

  “It’ll be in the others, though.”

  “Oh sure.”

  Lund hesitated half a breath. “Anything in it?”

  The big head wagged and the chair groaned. “I wish there was. She’d have come out with it and got him out of there a long time ago.”

  “So she’s just an IWW.”

  The secretary looked at him in amusement. When he looked directly into Lund’s face his eyes were so shining that they seemed a completely transparent covering for something beyond, some hidden, alert, outward-peering life. “Just?” he said. “That’s the highest office in this land of liberty.”

  So there was disappointment here too, in spite of all the certainty and confidence. He would find none of the answers he sought. The tiny office was layered with smoke, his legs felt as if he had walked a long way, his stomach fluttered with the queasiness that had never quite left him since noon. He said, remembering that streetcar ride and the way he had forced the girl out of her dignity and silence, “The Olson girl doesn’t seem to be the one, either.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Ricket said. “I don’t want to know anything. But if I was to guess I’d guess that kid had taken a beating.”

  Lund sighed. There was a short silence into which the accelerating argument in the other room came briefly loud: “That’s a lot of crap! Look at what they did at the second national convention. If it hadn’t been for De Leon we’d’ve …”

  The preacher rubbed his face, very tired. He thought with cunning hidden pleasure of the Pullman, the bed, the close green-curtained darkness where he could He down and let the motion of the train rock out of his mind the speculation and confusion, the whole war of affection and belief. To hide the treacherous evasiveness of the thought he laughed.

  “The trouble with me, I was trained as a minister. I keep looking for the right and wrong in things. The motive always seemed to me more important than the act. I keep being bothered by things. Why Joe doesn’t want lawyers, for instance. Why he sticks to a story like that one about protecting a woman. The only thing that seems in character at all is the way he keeps his mouth shut about what actually happened to him.”

  “That’s a fact,” Ricket said. “He’s a first-class clam. Maybe Christensen and Hilton can get him talking.”

  “Maybe he’ll fire them too.”

  Ricket winked. “He can’t. This thing’s out of his hands.”

  He rose, a tremendous man, a foot taller than Lund. A button of his shirt was undone, and black hair grew in a stiff curl through the opening, positive and direct as grass growing toward sunlight. He shook hands with the preacher and they wished each other luck.

  The Wobblies, Lund was thinking as he went toward his hotel to get his suitcase, were as automatic as a burglar alarm. Touch any part of the mechanism, let one member be misused, anywhere, and they went off in a loud single-minded uproar. An injury to one was an injury to all. They went no further. There was one enemy, the System. No matter what happened, they knew who was to blame. They recognized one virtue, loyalty to the cause, so that their souls and stomachs were not visited by doubt and queasiness. The revolutionary faith was a flux that absorbed moral complexities and even rational doubts as limestone absorbed impurities from iron ore. Once the flux had begun to operate, there were only two possibilities, one choice. Either or, our side or theirs, iron or slag.

  Joe would have support, if he would accept it; he would have a defense, if he would permit it; he would have widespread and unquestioning belief for any statement he chose to make, or any statement made in his name. He could sit still, as he had said he would, but others would move the chair he sat in. Those who would convict him because he was an IWW or those who would free him unquestioned for the same reason would pick a bone over his fate. But what of those who saw with a twist of almost fatherly solicitude the broken and crippled hand, and those who wondered against their own wish if Joe Hillstrom could really have entered that grocery store masked and armed, and if he had, then why?

  Was it disloyal to believe that almost any man was capable of almost any mistake or crime if the circumstances shoved him that way? Was it unfriendly to know that a friend was not perfect and incorruptible, but sadly human, and to like him in spite of the weaknesses he had: the profound inward hostility that made him strike out in retaliation, the fits of self-pity and self-justification, the pride and vanity, the latent violence, the great vague ambitions? Did it lessen Christ’s love for Peter to know that on his last night Peter would deny him thrice? Would it change his feelings about Joe to know for certain that Joe was guilty?

  He did not know. He knew only that he mistrusted the partisans who would hang or free Joe without regard for his guilt or innocence. In spite of the clumsiness and inadequacy of the court he had sat in that morning there was no solution for civilized men except to try to know, and if they could not know enough, then to know what they could. Being imperfect and human, Joe would have to put up with imperfect human justice, but it was justice that he ought to face, and not either organized vengeance or the organized clemency of friends.

  He had no doubt that justice, no matter which way it decided, would be denounced by one side or the other, or perhaps both.

  The Martyr

  1 Salt Lake City, 1914–1915

  Consider the way circumstance has of taking a man out of his own proper and recognizable character and subtly transforming him, coating him with the ions of a new personality as a lead tray is glazed with silver in an electroplating tank.

  Two men are on trial before the Third District Court in Salt Lake City. One is the IWW poet and song writer Joe Hill, a name known to many, and now a face that begins to be known too, a sensitive and thoughtful and fine face, with a resolute mouth and eyes like a compassionate Christ. Folders bearing his picture are stuck up in every hall west of the Big Sioux; an indignation meeting in New York has marched with his portrait on banners; sailors have carried the story of his case over the world. Shining with firm innocence, victimized because of his organizing activities, Joe Hill rises out of the murk of the labor wars, still serving the cause even in the System’s jail. More than life-size, of an immortal calmness and unshakable resolution, he takes shape in the minds of thousands, legendary, even mythical: Labor’s Songster.

  His origin is uncertain, for who can isolate for certain the egg and the sperm that unite to make a legend? Who can determine how much a man imposes his own myth of himself upon others and how much that myth is created by those who know him? Joe Hill began to be born in his songs and cartoons; certainly he lived, imperfectly realized, in the mind of a Swede sailor sitting on the San Pedro waterfront feeding a rat, or looking down the sad trough of Beacon Street and dreaming a dream of leading thousands. But now he acquires stature and outline through the labors of a committee; he is issued from a headquarters like news bulletins, and the headquarters is not S
alt Lake County jail but the IWW hall.

  Step by step, as the union fights his case against the hardening prejudices of courts and public, in an atmosphere increasingly edged and hostile, the character of Joe Hill is filled in by broadsides, pamphlets, appeals, form letters, news stories for the labor press. He emanates piecemeal from a dusty bare room where transient men sleep and cook and discuss and convene: a meager flophouse, a minimal lodge, a scanty asylum, a threadbare club, a primitive church whose symbol is the clenched fist of solidarity. It is in this cell of the new society forming within the shell of the old, this skimpy few square feet of the revolutionary future, that Joe Hill is properly born.

  Throughout the course of his creation his prototype Joe Hillstrom sits waiting in the county jail. Forbidden newspapers, he can be only vaguely aware of what is happening to his identity. The little information he gets comes to him through the steel mesh of the visitors’ window, or through conferences with the lawyers he has been prevailed upon to accept, or through letters that come to him from old friends, fellow workers, liberal groups, church organizations, sob-sisters, the known and the nameless who have heard his legend and wish him well. These are things which must work upon him slowly, sometimes as surprise and sometimes as reinforcement of his buried and incorrigible beliefs about himself.

  As the myth begins slowly and insensibly to encroach upon the man, which is the truer part? Is it Joe Hillstrom or Joe Hill, passionate man or passionless symbol, imperfect and possibly guilty flesh or a wronged spirit, who sits through the days of testimony with his bony shoulders turned on the crowd of sympathizers and union-haters and plain emotion-suckers who pack the room?

  Is it Joe Hillstrom or Joe Hill who is described in the hostile city papers as “cringing” when the prosecutor in his speech to the jury points a dramatic finger and calls him the most bloodthirsty animal in the annals of Utah crime? Does he watch with his own eyes or with the eyes of Labor’s Songster while his attorneys denounce the court as unfair and the trial as a farce; and is the sneer that touches his mouth personal or abstract when the district attorney makes a ranting reply: (My blood boils with keen resentment, gentlemen, when I hear such unwarranted attacks on American institutions—institutions which are the foundation stones of our glorious concepts of liberty, equality, and justice, and I tell you that when any considerable number of our fellow beings subscribe to the doctrine you heard enunciated this morning, then liberty flees the confines of our fair land and anarchy begins its sway …)?