Rebel Voices

An IWW Anthology

Joyce L. Kornbluh

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781604868449
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Welcoming women, Blacks, and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor's outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as "unorganizable." Wobblies organized the first sit-down strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6, 000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado (1927), and the first "no-fare" transit-workers' job-action (Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful, and world-famous strikes and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in the annals of working class emancipation.

Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers' culture. All but a few of America's most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs. IWW cartoons have long been recognized as labor's finest and funniest.

The impact of the IWW has reverberated far beyond the ranks of organized labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory and practice of direct action, solidarity, and "class-war" humor have inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and are a major source of ideas and inspiration for today's radicals. Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to "make this planet a good place to live" (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW's incomparable experience.

Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art, and lore. This new edition includes 40 pages of additional material from the 1998 Charles H. Kerr edition from Fred Thompson and Franklin Rosemont, and a new preface by Wobbly organizer Daniel Gross.

Chapter 5

Joe Hill: Wobbly Bard

Tomorrow I expect to take a trip to the planet Mars and, if so, will immediately commence to organize the Mars canal workers into the I.W.W. and we will sing the good old songs so loud that the learned star-gazers on earth will once for all get positive proof that the planet Mars really is inhabited. … I have nothing to say for myself only that I have always tried to make this earth a little better for the great producing class, and I can pass off into the great unknown with the pleasure of knowing that I never in my life double-crossed a man, woman or child.

JOE HULL to editor Ben Williams Solidarity (October 9, 1915).

On November 19, 1915, Joe Hill, a thirty-three year old Wobbly writer, was killed by a five-man firing squad in the prison yard of the Utah State Penitentiary. Circumstantial evidence supported the allegation that he had shot and killed a Salt Lake City grocer on January 10, 1914. His guilt is still a matter of dispute.

Before he was finally executed, the Joe Hill case had involved President Wilson, the acting secretary of state, the Swedish ambassador to the United States, Samuel Gompers, the daughter of the president of the Mormon Church, and thousands of persons around the world who staged protest demonstrations and sent letters appealing for his release.

Hill had been a member of the I.W.W. for probably only three years before he was arrested for murder in Salt Lake City. He, more than any other one writer, had made the I.W.W. a singing movement. He was the author of dozens of Wobbly songs which were printed on song cards and published in the Industrial Worker, Solidarity, and in the little red songbook. They had tough, humorous, skeptical words which raked American morality over the coals.

Joe Hill’s songs swept across the country; they were sung in jails, jungles, picket lines, demonstrations. I.W.W. sailors carried them to other countries. Wobblies knew their words as well as they knew the first sentence to the I.W.W. Preamble.

Yet, little is known about Joe Hill before he joined the I.W.W. about 1910, since he drifted from job to job like most single migrants. He chose to be reticent about the facts of his life, and when a friend wrote to him in prison asking for some biographical data, Hill scoffingly replied that he was a “citizen of the world,” and his birthplace was “the planet, Earth.”¹

In fact, Joe Hill was a Swede, born Joel Emmanuel Haaglund, who came to the United States about 1901 at the age of nineteen. It was claimed that he learned English at the YMCA in his hometown and as a seaman on freighters running between Sweden and England. By 1910, he was an I.W.W. member, active around the port of San Pedro, California, and in the next three years took part in the San Pedro dock workers’ strike, the San Diego free speech campaign, and an abortive revolution in Tia Juana, which aimed to make Lower California into a commune.

The date of Hill’s arrival in Utah is unknown. It is estimated that he was there about a month before grocer Morrison’s murder. His supporters claimed that he was “framed” by the Copper Trust and the Mormon Church because he helped organize workers at the United Construction Company at Bingham, Utah, who won a strike in 1913. He may have come in answer to the call from Utah’s I.W.W. Local 69 to stage a free speech fight. He was unemployed at the time of his arrest and rooming with his friend, Otto Applequist, at the home of some Wobblies, the Eselius brothers, in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City.

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Preface to the First Edition
• One Big Union: The Philosophy of Industrial Unionism
• With Folded Arms: The Tactics of Direct Action
• Riding the Rails: I.W.W. Itinerants
• Soapbox Militants: Free Speech Campaigns 1908–1916
• Joe Hill: Wobbly Bard
• Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
• Paterson: 1913
• Organizing the Harvest Stiffs
• Lumberjacks: North and South
• Down in the Mines
• Behind Bars: War and Prison
• An I.W.W. Miscellany: 1924–1964
• Notes
• Language of the Migratory Worker
• Selected Bibliography (1905–1963)
• Digging Iww History: Books Published since 1963, by Fred Thompson
• A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons, by Franklin Rosemont
• Index