‘The Man Who Never Died’: an account of Joe Hill’s life

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me. Says I,
“But Joe you’re 10 years dead.”
“I never died,” says he.
“The copper bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe,” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man,”
says Joe. “I didn’t die.”
“From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,” says he,
“you’ll find Joe Hill.”

– Alfred Hayes
and Earl Robinson, 1936

I first heard those words sung by the great African-American bass-baritone Paul Robeson in Hartford Avenue Baptist Church in Detroit in the 1950s, and then later by Pete Seeger. The words intrigued me. Who was this Joe Hill – just another folk hero like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan – or a real person?

Joe Hill, I later learned, was indeed real. An itinerant worker, he rode the rails up and down the West Coast in the early 20th century. He loaded cargo as a “wharf rat” in California, helped striking workers in Oregon sawmills and fought on the side of revolutionaries in Mexico. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or “Wobblies.” And he wrote dozens of songs “to fan the flames of discontent.”

In 1915, Hill was executed by a firing squad in Salt Lake City after being convicted of shooting a storekeeper. He died proclaiming his innocence. From his conviction to his death, he became an icon for workers everywhere, and his case sparked a worldwide movement for his freedom.

In his well-researched and tightly woven new book, The Man Who Never Died, William Adler produces the most complete account yet of Joe Hill’s life. Like a detective, he follows Hill’s trail from his birthplace in Gavle, Sweden, to his final days in Utah. Although Hill’s trail grows cold after his arrival in the United States in 1902, Adler picks up the scent again when, four years later, Hill emerges in San Francisco during the Great Earthquake. Adler traces Hill to Oregon, where he joins the Wobblies and then travels to other western states, finding inspiration for his songs in strikes and organizing drives. IWW members were practicing civil disobedience and filling the jails, refusing to yield their free-speech rights as they took to soapboxes to spread their message and lead mass singing. Like church hymns, union songs inspired confidence and hope, and Hill wrote new words, usually humorous barbs at the bosses, to popular tunes or gospel songs. He said that listening to a lecture or reading a dense pamphlet was often a chore – but, as Adler notes, singing together “could be a finely tuned instrument for building solidarity.”

Welcoming native-born workers and immigrants alike to its ranks, the IWW set about to build “one big union.” In Lawrence, Mass., the Wobblies led a successful strike by women textile workers in 1912. In Detroit, the IWW led the first auto strike in U.S. history at Studebaker in 1913, and an 18-year-old wisp of a girl, Matilda Rabinowitz, preached about the IWW to Ford workers, perhaps leading Henry Ford to institute his $5-a-day wage to ward off union “troublemakers.”

It was during this period that Hill made his way to Utah, moving in with friends near Salt Lake City while he looked for work. In 1914, police arrested him on suspicion of killing a storekeeper at closing time. Hill had shown up at a doctor’s office the same evening with a bullet wound, and police surmised, without any firm evidence, that he had been wounded by a shot fired by the storekeeper’s son. In a trial marked by judicial misconduct and media sensationalism, Hill was found guilty and sentenced to die.

Here, Adler’s riveting story takes a Hollywood turn. In a letter found years later in an Ann Arbor, Mich., attic, Hilda Erickson, a friend of Hill’s, writes of events that could have exonerated him. Inexplicably, Erickson never took the witness stand. Her testimony could have saved Hill’s life, but in the end she was one of his pallbearers.

Hill did not take the stand, either. He felt that under the American judicial system he should not have to prove his innocence and that he could never be convicted on the state’s flimsy evidence. As the worldwide movement grew demanding Hill’s release, he may also have seen himself as someone whose martyrdom would be more helpful to the working class than if he were to live, an ironic twist on the phrase “better dead then Red.”

After Hill’s death, government authorities stepped up their persecution of the IWW, raiding offices and arresting activists. In one bizarre episode, a postal official in Chicago confiscated an envelope holding some of Hill’s ashes (his body had been cremated and envelopes of ashes were mailed to supporters). The ashes were sent to the Bureau of Investigation, precursor of the FBI, and then languished in the Library of Congress until 1988, when they were returned to the IWW, a story reported in the April 1988 Solidarity magazine.

The Wobblies’ numbers declined in the 1920s, but their pattern of direct action re-emerged in the 1930s when workers in Flint, Mich., sat down on the job. The IWW’s slowdowns (“striking while working”) were echoed in later work-to-rule tactics of some unions. In a recent interview, Adler points to the Justice for Janitors drive and the mass protests in Wisconsin as having their roots in Wobbly tradition.

Hill may have given his mortal life for the union, but as Adler’s book makes clear, his spirit lives. “I never died, says he.”

Dave Elsila

Elsila was Solidarity editor and assistant director of the UAW Public Relations Department from 1976 until he retired in 1998. He is a member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.