At the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969, Joan Baez electrified the sea of people covering the hills of upstate New York with her ballad “Joe Hill.” In the song, Baez talks about a dream she had where she saw the labor movement leader who had been executed in Utah in the early-1900s. This phantasm says to Baez, “I never died.”
Joe Hill never did die in one very important sense. The State of Utah did their best to kill him when he was shot by a firing squad one hundred years ago at the old state prison. However, Joe Hill is still alive as an immortal symbol for the labor movement he lived for.
Today, Salt Lake City’s Sugar House Park is where the old prison was. On Saturday, Sept. 5, during Labor Day weekend, the people keeping Joe Hill alive in memory will hold an all-day concert there featuring some of the greatest names in folk and protest performers, headlined by Judy Collins. The complete schedule of performances is at their website. The fun starts at noon and goes until ten at night. If you’re not a Salt Lake City native, Sugar House Park is at 1400 East 2100 South in Salt Lake City. Admission is free!
Concert organizers note that there are “a couple of thousand” parking spaces at Sugar House Park and more in the nearby Sugar House shopping area. But for convenience, you might want to take the Sugar House Streetcar which connects to the Trax Central Pointe UTA station. It’s a short walk through the Sugar House shopping area to the park from the station.
Joe Hill was executed for allegedly murdering a grocery store owner on the corner of Eighth South and West Temple in Salt Lake City back in 1915. He was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, called the I.W.W. or, more commonly, the Wobblies. The labor movement believes Utah executed him on a trumped-up murder charge just to get rid of a troublesome labor organizer. Historians have sifted the evidence for a century to try to decide whether that was true. Some have concluded that he was guilty, but more recently, most have concluded that he was not. The only point of clarity today is that we will never know for certain.
Many of the issues that the Wobblies fought for are the same issues in the headlines today.
Income inequality
“There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among the millions of working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” –I.W.W. Constitution, 1905
Voting rights
“Politics had no meaning for a large portion of the working class … who were unable to vote.” –historian and labor lawyer Joyce Kornbluh writing about Joe Hill’s times
The IWW newspaper in the early 1900’s was called “Solidarity,” the same name used by the Polish trade union that led Poland to independence from Russia.
Joe Hill’s arrest even has an echo of a police shooting of an unarmed man. When the Salt Lake City police arrested Joe Hill, he was in bed recovering from a gunshot wound, dizzy from a shot of morphine for the pain, and completely unarmed. A Salt Lake City policeman shot him in the hand before discovering that he was just reaching for a handkerchief.
The Wobblies were a confrontational group. In general, they believed in destroying capitalism rather than fixing it and they believed in direct action—the general strike—rather than political action—voting. But they didn’t advocate violence as their enemies claimed. The Wobbly leader, Joseph Ettor, wrote, “If the workers of the world want to win … they have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. … As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there.”
Wobbly enemies often did resort to violence with strike breakers, company guards, and vigilantes. The San Diego Tribune editorialized in 1912, “Hanging is much too good for them. They would be much better off dead. …” The Tulsa Daily World said, “… strangle the I.W.W.’s. Kill them … Don’t scotch ‘em; kill ‘em dead.” A lot of them did end up dead.
What we do know for certain is that Joe Hill was a unique man of history. Although Wobblies and other labor organizers lost their lives in the turbulent labor strife just after the turn of the century, none of them command the immortality of Joe Hill. A more interesting question than whether Joe Hill was guilty is asked by Utah historian Gibbs Smith: “What … made the memory of Joe Hill live on in legend? To a large extent it was the legacy of his songs. Without them Hill would probably have been just another forgotten migrant worker.”
One of the most effective weapons of the Wobblies was song, and no one supplied that ammunition better than Joe Hill. The first Wobbly “Little Red Song Book” was published in 1909 and continues to be updated, although the most recent edition was published in 1995. When the Wobblies went on strike, they sang to build up their spirits. He wrote “The Preacher and the Slave” to the tune of the religious hymn, “Sweet Bye and Bye,” with what might be his most memorable lyrics:
You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
A concert in the park is an appropriate way to celebrate both Joe Hill, the folk songwriter, as well as Joe Hill, the man of history.
