by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
On Saturday night, January 10, 1914, at about 10 P.M., J. B. Morrison was closing his grocery, helped by his sons, Alving and Merlin. Two men, masked with red bandannas, broke into the store, rushed toward Morrison with their revolvers drawn, and fired. One of them shouted, “We’ve got you now.”2 Fourteen-year-old Merlin later testified that he ran to the rear of the store while his older brother reached for their father’s revolver, lying on a shelf near the icebox, and fired once before being shot down by the bandits who then rushed from the store. Alving died immediately; his father died later that night without regaining consciousness. Witnesses testified that as one of the men ran out the door he clutched his chest and said, “Oh, God, I’m shot.”3 Spots of blood were found in the alley at the rear of the building, although no blood was found in the store.
Morrison had spent a number of years as a policeman on the Salt Lake City force, and had told a newspaper reporter that he was afraid of reprisal from two men whom he had arrested. He was quoted in a news story as saying, “I have lived to regret that I ever was a member of the force.”4 He had been threatened twice before by bandits. In 1903 he had frustrated an attempted robbery by shooting at his assailants. Four months before his death, his store was broken into again by two armed men. At the trial Merlin testified that his father had loaded his gun “just before the men came in.”5
About two hours after the Morrison shooting, Hill arrived at the office of Dr. F. N. McHugh, about five miles from Morrison’s store. He was bleeding heavily from a bullet wound in his left lung. As McHugh helped Hill remove his blood-soaked coat, a shoulder holster containing an automatic pistol fell from his clothes. Hill explained that he had been shot in a quarrel over a woman. He asked the doctor to keep the incident quiet since he wished to protect the woman’s reputation. Noting that the bullet had passed through Hill’s body, McHugh treated the wound. A colleague drove Hill to the Eselius home.
McHugh reported Hill’s visit to the police and agreed to cooperate in apprehending him. Three days later, he visited Hill at the Eselius home to treat the wound and drugged him in the process. A drowsy Hill was aroused soon after by four policemen, who broke into his room with drawn revolvers. One fired a shot which grazed Hill’s shoulder and went through his right hand. Although he was in critical condition from his lung and hand wounds, Hill was put into a solitary cell at the county jail rather than into the prison hospital. He was charged with the murder of John and Alving Morrison and imprisoned for five months awaiting trial.
Long before the trial, the Salt Lake City press and police had found Hill guilty. The San Pedro chief of police forwarded information about Hill’s alien status and I.W.W. membership. It made good copy. The newspapers published Hill’s “crime record” on January 24 and kept up a barrage of articles vilifying the man and the organization. His lawyers later claimed, “The main thing the state has against Hill is that he is an I.W.W. and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the I.W.W. out of it … but the papers fastened it upon him.”6
Confusion and contradiction marked the testimony of witnesses during the trial which started June 10, 1914. None of the witnesses, including Merlin Morrison, identified Hill as one of the men who entered the grocery store. Although the bullet which had wounded Hill had passed through his body, leaving a jagged hole in the back of his coat, no slug was found during a search of the store. The bullet holes in Hill’s coat were four inches lower than those in his body and his lawyers claimed that Hill’s hands were over his head when he had been shot by the assailant. Dr. McHugh had seen only the handle of Hill’s automatic pistol, and Hill claimed that he had tossed the gun away after leaving the doctor’s office. Since the gun could not be found, it was never proven that Hill had fired the fatal shots.
Hill repeatedly refused to testify or give more information about his movements the night of January 10. He declined to give the names of the persons involved in the quarrel which he maintained to his death was the reason for his wound. He would say nothing about his roommate, Otto Applequist, suspected as the second gunman, who disappeared from Salt Lake City the night of the murder and was never found.
In a dramatic outburst during the courtroom trial Hill publicly fired his lawyers, two attorneys who had volunteered to defend him without charge. Hill claimed that they were not cross-examining the state’s witnesses nor objecting to leading questions from the district attorney. Against Hill’s wishes, the judge brought the law yers back into the case as “friends of the court.” Hill tried again to discharge his lawyers and attempted to conduct his own defense. Toward the end of the trial, the I.W.W. hired O. N. Hilton of Denver, Colorado, a prominent labor lawyer who had defended members of the Western Federation of Miners.
Ten days after the trial began, despite irregularities and unanswered questions, Hill was declared guilty and sentenced to be executed. Hill and the I.W.W. maintained that he had not had a fair trial.
At a time when defense funds were needed for many I.W.W. prisoners around the country, Hill was singled out for special help. An appeal for funds in the April 18, 1914, issue of Solidarity stated that Hill was “one of the best-known men in the movement, beloved by all who knew him,” and went on to say:
Now there is not one in this organization that can say he does not know this man. For wherever rebels meet, the name of JOE HILL is known. Though we do not know him personally, what one among us can say he is not on speaking terms with “Scissor Bill,” “Mr. Block” or who has not heard the “White Slave” or listened to a rendering of the famous “Casey Jones” song and many others in the little red songbook?7
Early in 1915, a special Joe Hill edition of the I.W.W. songbook was sold to raise money for his defense.
Industrial Worker, April 24, 1913.
Characteristically, Hill’s twenty-two months in prison were spent serving the “Organization.” Along with a voluminous correspondence, he continued producing articles, poems, and songs which filtered through the union’s channels and which were used to raise money on his behalf. In letters to other Wobblies, he expressed concern about the costs of carrying his defense to higher courts. To his lawyer, O. N. Hilton, he wrote: “I’m afraid we’ll have to let it go as is … because I cannot expect my friends to starve themselves in order to save my life.”8 To Haywood he wrote: “I can see where money can be used to a great advantage at present by the Organization and there is no use to be sentimental about it, Bill; we cannot afford to let the whole organization go bankrupt just on account of one individual.”9 Similar letters were sent to Ed Rowan, secretary of Salt Lake’s Local 69, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
As Hill’s appeal made its way through the Utah courts, efforts to save him snowballed into national and international proportions. When the Utah Supreme Court turned down his appeal in July 1915, over 10,000 letters were received in the state capitol protesting the decision. Fearing an influx of Wobbly agitators, officials doubled the guards at Hill’s prison and ordered machine guns placed at the entrance. Since some of the letters contained threats, the homes of Governor Spry and other state officials were put under heavy guard. Ironically, the only act of violence during this time was the shooting of an unarmed Wobbly soapbox speaker by a Salt Lake City police captain.
When the Board of Pardons met on September 18 to consider the case, Hill again refused to tell how he had been shot. Nevertheless, he insisted on having a new trial. The Board of Pardons refused to change the date of execution set for thirteen days later by the Utah Supreme Court. This touched off a series of demonstrations and intercessions which destined the Joe Hill case to be a cause celebre in United States’ history.
Thousands of letters, resolutions, and petitions from all parts of the world were received at the state capitol asking Governor Spry to pardon Hill or commute his sentence. A committee of California women and Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of the president of the Mormon Church, appealed to the Swedish minister to the United States to intervene and to ask for a reprieve since Hill was
still a Swedish citizen. Because of the large amount of mail the State Department had been receiving and the international implications of the case, the United States’ acting secretary of state also urged the governor to grant a reprieve.
Convinced that Hill had not had a fair trial, the Swedish minister contacted President Wilson the day before the scheduled execution. Wilson telegraphed Governor Spry asking for a postponement of the execution until the Swedish minister had had a chance to present his view of the case. After a meeting with the Board of Pardons, Spry replied to Wilson: ‘We have found no reason whatever why clemency should be extended.”10 He agreed to a stay of execution until the next Board of Pardons’ meeting, sixteen days later.
On October 18, despite a direct plea for clemency from the Swedish minister, the Utah Board of Pardons denied a commutation of sentence to life imprisonment. Two days later, Hill was resentenced to die in a month and a day.
Hundreds of groups in the United States and abroad organized protest meetings, passed resolutions, and mailed petitions to Utah officials, President Wilson, and the press. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Mrs. J. Sergeant Cramm, wife of a member of the New York Public Service Commission, had a short interview with President Wilson, who promised to intercede again. A.F.L. President Samuel Gompers sent the Utah governor and Board of Pardons a resolution passed by the thirty-fifth annual A.F.L. convention in San Francisco, urging them to stop the execution and grant a new trial. Gompers telegraphed President Wilson to help save Hill’s life, since there was so much doubt concerning the case.
For the second time, President Wilson wired Governor Spry asking for a thorough reconsideration of Hill’s sentence. Utah officials and the state press resented this meddling, which, they claimed, was “unworthy, based on misconception and, if successful, would destroy the usefulness of the state’s courts….” 11 Spry replied firmly to Wilson: “A further postponement at this time would be an unwarranted interference with the course of justice.”12
This time, all efforts on Hill’s behalf failed. On his last day, Hill wired Bill Haywood: “Goodbye, Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”13 A second telegram to Haywood read: “It is only a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”14
Haywood replied: “Goodbye, Joe. You will live long in hearts of the working class. Your songs will be sung wherever workers toil, urging them to organize.”15
On the afternoon before the execution, Hill was interviewed by a reporter from the Salt Lake City Tribune. During the interview, Hill scribbled “My Last Will,” a poem which he gave, together with his silk neck scarf, to Ed Rowan, who visited him that evening. His last letter was to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
In Utah a condemned man had his choice—to be hung or to be shot by a firing squad. Hill chose to be shot. Legend has it that he shouted the order, “Fire,” to his executioners. The next morning, a New York Times editorial wondered whether Hill’s death “left an opening for people to make a hero of him” and might make “Hillstrom dead more dangerous to social stability than when he was alive.”16
Joe Hill was given a martyr’s funeral. Following funeral services in Salt Lake City, his body was shipped to Chicago. There, an estimated 30,000 sympathizers attended the funeral and marched through the streets to the cemetery. His ashes were put into small envelopes and scattered to the winds “in every state of the union and every country of the world” on May Day 1916.
Immediately after Hill’s execution, Governor Spry vowed in a press conference to rid Utah of the “lawless element,” stop street speaking, and “use the militia … if necessary to clear the state….” 17 Virginia Snow Stephen was fired from the faculty at the University of Utah for her support of Hill, and lawyer O. N. Hilton, who gave the funeral address in Chicago, was disbarred in Utah.
There are too few facts known to separate adequately the legend of Joe Hill from the man. Chaplin wrote that Hill neither smoked, drank, nor was a ladies’ man; he was noted for his generosity and frequently “gave away his last rice.”18 On the other hand, Mac McClintock, who only met Hill two or three times, claimed he remembered him as a “real life Raffles” in a conservative blue suit and black tie, who, if he was a criminal, “robbed from the robbers.”19 But no one, recalled Mac, ever saw Hill get into a fight.
Hill’s songs and writings articulated the simple Marxism of the I.W.W. Preamble and the Wobbly philosophy of “direct action.” His article, “The People,” complained sardonically of the attitudes of national politicians. He criticized the “ruling class” for their selfishness and lack of morality in human relations. He shared with other Wobblies the sentiment that “war certainly shows up the capitalist system in its right light. Millions of men are employed at making ships and others are hired to sink them. Scientific management, eh wot?”20 On the struggle for existence, he remarked:
Self-preservation is, or should be, the first law of nature. The animals when in a natural stage are showing us the way. When they are hungry they will always try to get something to eat or else they will die in the attempt. That’s natural; to starve to death is unnatural.21
Yet he was perceptive enough to understand that “as a rule, a fellow don’t bother his head much about unions and theories of the class struggle when his belly is flapping up against his spine.”22 Within the I.W.W. his songs were recognized for their inspiration and recruiting value because he articulated the frustrations, hostilities, and humor of the homeless and the dispossessed. As one member of the organization put it:
How did Joe Hill come to write such songs as that? How did he know how the workers on the Fraser River felt? How did he know how it felt to have your pay envelope short of the price of two loaves of bread so you went out on the streets with the workers from the textile mills of Lawrence…. Wherever Joe Hill was he somehow felt like the workers and he wrote for them a song…. How astonishing! People from all parts of the world, all speaking different dialects and all singing the same song.23
A lyrical description of Hill’s songs was voiced by Ralph Chaplin who wrote:
[they are] as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of lilting laughter and keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; simple, forceful and sublime songs; songs of and for the worker, written in the only language that he can understand and set to the music of Joe Hill’s own heart.24
Hill was eulogized by I.W.W. writers Ralph Chaplin, Covington Hall, Cash Stevens, Henry George Weiss, T-Bone Slim, and many others. His songs continued to be sung all over the world. “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Casey Jones” became American folk songs, and “pie in the sky,” a slogan for a generation in the 1930’s. Hill, the man, became a legend compared to Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, and other folk heroes—preserved by novelists, playwrights, poets, and researchers. His story has inspired more writing than any other labor hero.
One Big Union Monthly, November 1919.
In 1947, Wallace Stegner wrote that Joe Hill’s biography in Dos Passos’s 1919 and Earl Robinson’s ballad “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,”
… have built Joe Hill into a folk hero, almost the number one labor martyr and legend…. People have made him into a Galahad, a hero, and a martyr, and they have done so because he gave them the opportunity, he offered the leads. He had what none of the other dozens of eligible martyrs had—imagination, a flair. His curtain line was magnificent: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!” He died for a cause, for a principle, for a woman’s honor, for the things that fire the imagination, and the world-wide scattering of his ashes was a fitting finale. That symbolic act fertilized both the movement his songs served and the legend of labor’s songster.25
Most recentiy, writer Barry Nichols has called Joe Hill “the Twentieth Century’s first egg-head, heman folk hero.”26
Wobblies, socialists, communists, A.F.L.-C.I.O. members transc
end sectarian differences to sing Joe Hill’s songs and share his lore. The man and the martyr have combined into a continuing legend of “the man who never died.”
1
“The Treacher and the Slave” sometimes called “Pie in the Sky” or “Long-Haired Preachers” is considered Joe Hill’s masterpiece. It was printed in the third edition of the I.W.W. songbook and sung to the hymn tune, “Sweet Bye and Bye.” Twelve years after HilVs death, Carl Sandburg included it in his collection, The American Song-bag (New York, 1927). The song quickly became a part of American folk tradition. Henry F. May in his book, The End of American Innocence (New York, 1961), wrote: “Here, if anywhere, was a clear breach with timidity, moralism, and the whole manner and content of the standard American culture. ‘Long-haired preachers try to tell us what’s right and wrong, but turn out to offer only ‘pie in the sky.’ ”
THE PREACHER AND THE SLAVE*
By JOE HILL
(Tune: “Sweet Bye and Bye”)
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ‘bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
Chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You 11 get pie in the sky when you die.
The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray.
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you are on the bum: