Joe Hill: The Songwriter Utah Shot

The night before his execution, Joe Hill wired the Industrial Workers of the World’s general secretary, Bill Haywood:

Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize

He sent a second telegram right after, about the one thing he still had a say in:

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.

At dawn on November 19, 1915, a firing squad at the Utah State Penitentiary carried out the sentence a Salt Lake City jury had handed him for a double murder he denied to the end. He was thirty-six. The phrase from that telegram escaped the case: “don’t mourn, organize” is still the line unions reach for at a funeral, most of the time with no idea it started as an actual wire from an actual man a few hours from being shot.

Gävle to San Pedro

Joe Hill was born Joel Hägglund in Gävle, on Sweden’s eastern coast, on October 7, 1879, the fourth of six surviving children of a railroad conductor. His father died in 1887, and the children left school to work. Hill took a job in a rope factory and then as a fireman on a steam crane, shoveling coal into a boiler for money instead of an education. He emigrated to the United States with his brother Paul, arriving in New York on October 28, 1902, and spent the next several years drifting through odd jobs under the name Joseph Hillström, which he eventually shortened to Joe Hill.

By around 1910 he had landed in San Pedro, California, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World and became secretary of its local. San Pedro is also where he started writing songs for the union’s Little Red Songbook, built on hymn tunes because every migrant worker in a boxcar or a mining camp already knew the melody and only needed new words.

“Pie in the sky” and “The Rebel Girl”

His first songbook contribution, in 1911, was “The Preacher and the Slave,” a parody of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” aimed at street preachers who told hungry workers their reward was waiting for them in heaven. The song is where “pie in the sky” entered the language: a promise that only pays off after you’re dead. Hill kept writing through the following years, and his most enduring song came out of his last stretch of freedom. In 1915 he wrote “The Rebel Girl” for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW organizer the rank and file already called by that nickname; Flynn confirmed the dedication herself, in her own memoir, decades later.

The night John Morrison died

On January 10, 1914, two armed men walked into a Salt Lake City grocery run by John G. Morrison, a former police officer, and shot him and his teenage son Arling to death. A younger son, thirteen-year-old Merlin, survived by hiding. That same night, Hill showed up at the office of Dr. Frank McHugh with a bullet hole through his chest. He said he’d been shot in a dispute over a woman, refused to say which woman, and refused for the rest of his life to say anything more. Salt Lake City police arrested him three days later.

A trial with no weapon, no witness, no motive

The trial ran through June 1914 before Judge Morris L. Ritchie, and it never produced a weapon tied to Hill, an eyewitness who identified him, or a motive. The state’s whole case was the coincidence of the wound and the silence around it, at a moment when Utah’s mining and business interests were openly hostile to the IWW, and labor papers across the country called the case a frame-up. Hill grew so frustrated with his own lawyers’ handling of a witness that he tried to fire them mid-trial; the judge let him try, he relented, and he still never took the stand to explain the one fact that might have freed him. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder on June 28, 1914. At sentencing on July 8, offered a choice between hanging and the firing squad, Hill picked the squad, telling the court he’d “been shot a few times” already and could stand it again.

The clemency campaign that failed

Utah’s Board of Pardons refused to commute the sentence in September 1915, by which point the case had become an international cause. Sweden’s minister to Washington appealed on Hill’s behalf, so did the American Federation of Labor, and so did Helen Keller, already the country’s best-known socialist. President Woodrow Wilson wired Governor William Spry twice, the second time two days before the execution. Spry granted one stay of the original October 1 execution date, then held to a single condition: he would order a new trial only if someone produced evidence that Hill was innocent, evidence Hill was still not offering. At dawn on November 19, 1915, five deputies with rifles faced him at the penitentiary. He was pronounced dead within minutes, and his body went by train to Chicago, where thousands attended a funeral and he was cremated on November 26.

The alibi he protected

What Hill would not say became clear, or as clear as it will get, ninety-six years after his death. In his 2011 biography The Man Who Never Died, journalist William M. Adler found a 1949 letter from Hilda Erickson, the young woman in whose family’s house in Murray, Utah, Hill had boarded. Erickson wrote that Hill privately told her the man who shot him that night was Otto Appelquist, a friend who had also been courting her. Appelquist left town before Hill’s arrest and was never charged with anything. Adler’s best guess, since Hill left no explanation of his own, is that he protected Erickson’s reputation rather than his own neck, and that she stayed silent for the same reason while he was still alive to ask it of her. Adler names a career criminal, Magnus Olson, who used a string of aliases and matched the description police circulated before they settled on Hill, as his candidate for who actually killed the Morrisons. None of this reached a courtroom while it could have done Hill any good.

Every state but Utah

The IWW followed his second telegram to the letter, and then some. Hill’s ashes went into roughly six hundred small envelopes, printed with his photograph and the caption “Murdered by the Capitalist Class.” Bill Haywood handed some out to delegates at the union’s November 1916 convention and mailed the rest to sympathizers in every state but Utah and to unions on several continents. The popular version, that all of it was scattered together on May Day 1916, does not hold up: the documented ceremonies happened later and separately, among them a Work People’s College assembly in Duluth in February 1917, a lakeside gathering in Cleveland that March, and a scattering on the graves of the Everett Massacre dead in Seattle that May. One envelope never reached anyone. A Chicago postmaster intercepted it in the mail on October 11, 1917, reportedly damaged by a canceling machine and flagged under the wartime mail restrictions the government was using against the IWW, and it disappeared into Post Office files and then the National Archives for seven decades, until a Utah researcher named Lori Taylor turned it up in the 1980s. On November 18, 1988, a day before the execution’s 73rd anniversary, the archives released it to IWW representatives and the folk singer Utah Phillips, who scattered most of what remained across several countries and kept a pinch of it inside the body of one of his guitars.

Why he’s still on the shirt

In 1936 the composer Earl Robinson set Alfred Hayes’s poem about Hill’s ghost to music, and “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” has been performed since by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, among others. The case against him is still argued over in Utah archives and biography footnotes, a century on, without a verdict anyone can call final. What isn’t in dispute is the telegram: a man about to be shot for a crime he never explained, using his last hours to tell the people he organized with to skip the part where they cried about it.