When a Utah firing squad executed labor union activist and songwriter Joe Hill on November 19, 1915, a legend was born, a murder mystery buried, and a travesty of injustice committed. The myth has endured on the political left and inspired modern musicians such as Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, and Phil Ochs. But more than anything, it showed how collective egos clashed with the pride of an individual so that both sides got what they wanted and yet nobody won.
William M. Adler makes all of this clear in his fine biography, "The Man Who Never Died -- The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon." In fact, Adler probably comes closer than anyone to writing the definitive account of Hill's sad story, and to conducting the most thorough investigation possible of the crime for which he was killed. But what makes this book especially fascinating is the way that Adler's research supports his subtitle. Throughout this tale, he gives events of 100 years ago a powerful contemporary relevance in terms of how what happened then can still teach us lessons today.
Then as now, economic inequality was a very real problem in the United States. As Adler notes in his Introduction: "A federal study in 1915 found one-third to one-half of the population living at a `near-starvation level' while 2 percent of Americans owned 60 percent of the nation's wealth."
Under these conditions, the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies" for short) took the opportunity to challenge corporate management with a form of "direct action" that had never been used as effectively in this country before. The Wobblies shunned the softer tactics of the more employer-friendly American Federation of Labor, and constantly pushed for "One Big Union" to demand better treatment for all working men and women. They pursued this mission through a creative combination of organizing blue-collar citizens from the street level up and spreading their message with some of the first commercial folk/protest songs.
The latter is where Joe Hill came into the picture because of his natural talent for writing topical lyrics set to popular tunes of his time. As Hill said himself, "A pamphlet is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over." In this vein, the popular expression, "you'll get pie in the sky when you die" comes straight from Hill's "The Preacher and the Slave" composition that followed the melody for "In the Sweet By and By."
The prosaic details of the double murders that Hill was convicted of seem mundane when compared to the scope of the forces involved in condemning him to the death penalty. Sometime between 9:45 and 10:15 pm on Saturday, January 10, 1914, two masked men burst into the Salt Lake City grocery store of John G. Morrison. One of the intruders shot and killed Morrison, a former city policeman, along with his son Arling, while Morrison's younger son, Merlin, may or may not have witnessed the crime from the back of the store.
This was not the first time someone had tried to hold up the elder Morrison, but on this occasion it appeared that Arling had managed to produce a gun and return fire during the attack. Coincidentally, later that night, Joe Hill turned up at a local physician's house, asking to be treated for a bullet wound he had taken to his chest earlier in the evening. Other than this circumstantial evidence, there was nothing to link Hill to the homicides of Morrison and his boy. Young Merlin could not even positively identify Hill as the gunman. More than that, the police initially arrested another suspect who seemed far more likely to be the murderer. His booking name was Frank Z. Wilson, but that was just one of numerous aliases for the man originally known as Magnus Olson, who -- unfortunately for Joe -- not only looked very much like Hill but was also a fellow immigrant with many of the same characteristics.
Adler builds a convincing case that Wilson was the real murderer of the Morrisons, citing police records that indicate Wilson had a violent history, was acting suspiciously near the scene of the hold-up later that night, and had been on a serious crime spree in the days immediately before and after the grocer and his child were killed. However, for reasons which still remain unclear, the detectives apparently believed Wilson's proclamations of innocence and let him go ... whereupon he continued to break the law and commit more acts of violence, eventually even getting caught up in the notorious 1929 St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago.
This is where things get complicated and the investigation takes a twist. Alerted by the doctor who treated Hill's bullet wound to the chest, the police picked up Joe at the house where he had been staying with friends, and brought him to the station for questioning. Once under interrogation, Hill denied murdering the Morrisons, but refused to say how he was shot on the night of the crime.
That stubbornness would doom him to the grave, and for many years the mystery has been why Hill never provided the alibi that could have saved his life. This is where Adler has uncovered some startling new information that strongly suggests Hill was unfairly tried and wrongly executed. At the same time, the author advances a plausible theory for what kept Hill silent when his very existence was at stake.
Born Joel Emanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, on October 7, 1879, the young man immigrated to the United States in 1902 and soon Americanized his name to Joe Hillstrom before shortening it still further to Joe Hill. Little is known of his first few years here, but he is believed to have worked his way west, doing odd jobs wherever he could, appearing in Cleveland in December 1905, and witnessing (and writing about) the great San Francisco earthquake of April 1906, before eventually joining the Wobblies in Portland sometime around 1908. As an itinerant "bindlestiff," or low-wage working man, Hill was just one more nobody traveling across the country and trying to eke out a living in a particularly difficult environment where there was plenty of cheap labor for business to exploit. He often suffered the indignities common to immigrants of that era, but as the IWW's bard-in-residence, Hill discovered a higher purpose.
This is the context in which the drama that killed him unfolded. So when he was arrested for the Morrison murders, Hill finally had a reputation to uphold. Initially, he told the surgeon who treated his chest wound that another fellow had shot him in a dispute over a woman, but then said he did not wish to discuss the matter further. At his trial, despite the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment supporting his refusal to testify, Hill's silence cost him dearly. His unwillingness to provide an alternative explanation, rebutting the prosecution's claim that he was injured during the hold-up at the grocery, apparently sealed his fate.
Now, in "The Man Who Never Died," Adler produces some proof that Hill's wound on the night of the murders did indeed result from a jealous spat over a lady Joe was involved with at the time. The new evidence comes from the woman in question herself. In 1914, Hilda Erickson was engaged to Hill's friend Otto Appelquist when he and Hill were both staying at her parent's house. However, Erickson apparently became smitten with Joe and broke off her engagement with Appelquist. Erickson describes what occurred next in a letter she wrote to a scholar researching Hill's case in 1949.
"... Joe was wounded on the same night as the Morrison case," she recalled. "I came home from Salt Lake the following Sunday afternoon. I saw Joe in my grandmother's parlor. He was lying on her old-fashioned iron cot. ... I asked him what was the matter. ... He finally told me that `Otto shot him in a fit of anger.' ... When I heard this about Otto I was very angry myself, then I knew that Otto went away because Joe may die. But when I heard about the Morrison case, I was bewildered and did not know what to think. I saw Joe every Sunday afternoon in the Salt Lake jail. I would speak English to him, but he would talk Swedish to me in a low voice and tell me not to say a word because he was innocent of the Morrison case. Therefore the state of Utah could not prove him guilty."
Quite the contrary, given the anti-union sentiment in Salt Lake City, and the sensational nature of the Morrison case, a jury hand-picked by the judge had no problem convicting Hill, based largely on his failure to provide an alibi. Joe's name as a well-known propagandist for the IWW, and a writer of subversive songs, certainly did not help him either.
But why did Hill stay quiet when the Utah Supreme Court -- in an astonishingly cynical legal decision -- confirmed the outcome of his trial, and it gradually became obvious that he would not be given another? The issue seems to have come to a head at the Utah Board of Pardons hearing in which the state's chief judicial officials allegedly offered Hill an unconditional pardon if he would only tell them how and why he was shot on the night of the murders. According to Adler, Hill responded through his lawyer with "a one-sentence valedictory," saying: "Gentlemen, the cause I stand for, that of a fair and honest trial, is worth more than human life -- much more than mine."
At that moment, you can practically see the gears of the legal and political machinery click into place, with the inevitability of Hill being ground into dust the only possible conclusion. As Adler puts it, "Already enshrined by labor as an icon of courage and resistance, Hill had reached that extraordinary place that martyrs come to: the belief that he was worth infinitely more to the cause as a symbol than as an individual, and that by dying a dramatic death, the symbol would live in perpetuity."
In some respects, Hill's situation appears similar to that of Private Eddie Slovik, the U.S. Army soldier who would be executed for desertion during the last days of World War II nearly 30 years later. In both cases, one gets the sense that those in charge did not really want to kill him, and that the condemned man probably would have been granted clemency if he would only compromise his conscience, respect their authority, and accept a future of disgrace. Neither Hill nor Slovik was willing to make that trade. Ultimately, each was a prisoner of his principles as much as anything else.
The rest is nearly anti-climactic. President Woodrow Wilson wrote to Utah Governor William Spry and got him to postpone Hill's execution once, but Spry refused his second request. Hill penned a final plea in which he urged his union comrades to continue organizing workers instead of mourning his death. And he composed a beautifully poetic last will and testament in which he wished all his followers good luck with the struggle that would have to go on without him.
Altogether, Adler has done an excellent job of bringing Joe Hill's life and times back into focus, and explaining why the case still resonates with us today. However, it must be said that he also makes a serious unforced error in describing some of the events in which the labor union movement was involved as Hill's case played out.
The biggest mistake is Adler's careless references to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910. Although it is now generally accepted that union activist James B. McNamara set the bomb that killed 21 newspaper employees and injured hundreds more (even the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow could not get him acquitted), Adler continues to give credence to a few union leaders who claimed that a gas leak was responsible for the explosion and fire. The author's failure to set the record straight on this score undermines his credibility in general, and the reader is left to wonder how much Adler's bias toward the union cause has affected his judgment in other areas.
That being said, "The Man Who Never Died" remains one of the best biographies I have read in the past year, and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in Joe Hill's singular experience as the troubadour of the American labor movement.
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Top reviews from other countries
noonefamous
Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915
Reviewed in Canada on April 25, 2014
M. A. Holmquist
The best biography of Joe Hill
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2014
Scrat
A biography worthy of Joe Hill.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2013
