Customer Reviews

Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture

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I grew up with stories of the IWW permiating my family. They were legendary do gooders (mom's side of the family) and absolute evil (dad's). I choose mom's view. This book of several dozen short essays on the IWW and Joe Hill is one of the best I've ever read on the subject. And I have most every book written on the subject and several file drawers full of photocopies to boot.

Rosemont uses Joe Hill, the world's most famious wobbly, as a reason not only for the book but as a muse. The stories of Joe Hill, often from older wobblies who actually knew Joe Hill, are excellent and often the only place where you can find them.

But most of the book uses Hill as a muse to reflect on Rosemonts' own experiences as an IWW, and more importantly, the experiences of other IWWs he has known. For example, in my faourite article, Rosemont starts with the fact that Joe Hill was an accomplished Chinese cook. He asks the question, why? That leads to historic documents and personal recolections which discuss the IWW's affinity for Chinese cooking as a solidarity effort with chinese workers being discriminated against by the AFL, et all.

Sure there are aspects of speculation in Rosemonts book. So what? He knew dozens of old IWWs as a young man and knows their unwritten histories. I knew half a dozen old wobs when I was a young man and Franklin Rosemont's book rings true, its just like the stories old wobblies told me. This is the stuff, as they would say.

This book is so much better than an academic history. They are dead and dry. This book is fun, a delight, a living history, an oral history. From my long experience with the IWW (25 or so years) as well as the stories told to me by the first generation of wobblies, this book is spot on the money. This is a real IWW history, told in an IWW manner.

Buy two copies, one to read, one to lend.

This is a huge and wonderful book, full of the details of Joe Hill's life. Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in this 642-page opus. Frustrated academics often rail at the little supporting documentation surrounding the lives of working class heros, from blues singers to union organizers, and they often abandon ship in the face of such frustration. But Rosemont has had the endurance to follow every trail leading to and from Joe Hill, and we the readers are much richer for it. It's also a mini-history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and their relationship to the arts, poetry, feminism, cops, Stalinism, the Beats and more. There's even a chapter discussing Joe Hill myths! Profusely illustrated with IWW and Joe Hill graphics, this book will give you hours of enjoyable reading.

There are parts of this book which are utterly engrossing. Rosemont constructs a fine narrative of events. Perhaps I should say "events", as it is at times researched like a eighth-grade paper. Lots of conjecture, unsupported speculation, hearsay and other aspects of irresponsible scholarship. Mr. Rosemont freely admits that there is frustratingly little concrete evidence about much of Hill's life, but he chooses to try and flesh out a lengthy book anyways. This is exasperating at times as when one is forced to try and endure each and every tedious mentioning of the drawn or painted art of Joe Hill, despite the lack of much actual material (surviving anyways). However, by doing this he touches on many peripheral aspects of Hill's life that have gone by and large unnoticed till now, but which are much easier to verify than the sketchy details about Hill himself. Several mentions of correspondence, lives affected by Hill, and reactions to Hill's art, and many others tidbits of information are thrown out for more or less the first time in cohesive form. Less cohesive, and downright teasing at times, are many starts and stops of several ideas that would be very interesting on their own. The Wobbly influence on the beat poets, the slighting of the IWW by other revolutionary and pseudorevolutionary groups (rarely written about from a fellow worker's perspective), and others seem like promising beginnings for reading but then are waded into only ankle-deep. At one point when abandoning a topic Mr. Rosemont even suggests that it would be a good idea for further research, by someone else. All in all a fairly decent read but could have used prodigious editing and some fact-checking with standards higher than those of the NY Times.

I bought this book researching Joe Hill, who eludes Rosemont as effectively as he does everyone else. The material he finds about the Wobbly bard could be effectively contained in a monograph, but once you accept that, this is a delightful work, full of illustrations, pleas for submissions of information, and endless tidbits about Franklin Rosemont, his imagination, research, and beliefs. He's an indefatigable reader, a passionate latter-day Wobbly, and a treasure trove of anecdote and speculation. Reading the book was something akin to proofreading a friend's manuscript: you end up trying to be supportive even as you acknowledge a kind of looseness -- after all it's HIS book, not yours. Joe Hill is rife with cuttable sections -- after the second attack on Wallace Stegner, the reader's eyes glaze over -- but the prose style and intellectual speculation are loose enough to encourage judicious skimming. Joe Hill's anachronistic relationships to such things as ecology and Beatnik poetry are figments of Rosemont's imagination more than subjects for serious inquiry, but they're the kind of things that one thinks about while deciding whether to get out of bed in the morning or while driving to work with U. Utah Phillips playing in the background. My own research into Hill's life and work was helped immeasurable by Rosemont's trailblazing in the field -- his bibliography alone is worth the cost of the book. In the process of reading this book, I feel like I made a new friend, even if it wasn't Joe Hill. Read this book by all means.

Franklin Rosemont's "Joe Hill" is more than just another biography of the man. While Rosemont's biographical work on Hill is impressive on it's own, this work serves equally well as a history of Wobbly thought. Rosemont rightly places Joe Hill as the quintessential IWW rank-and-filer. He does not go out of his way to glorify Hill. In fact, Rosemont readily deconstructs many of the myths surrounding Hill's life while managing to preserve his radical spirit. This book shows Joe Hill's personal politics to be devoutly Wobbly, and then seeks to highlight how the radical tradition of the IWW has influenced social, cultural and political movements throughout the decades since Hill's death.