Prisoner/Activist Profile: Joe Hill

Article by Julia Lutsky 

Joel Emmanuel Haagland was just 23 when he and his brother came steerage to America from Sweden in 1902. They were two of the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island in New York harbor at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like other immigrants, they were in search of the streets said to be paved with gold.

Haagland did not find the gold—just work in New York City cleaning spittoons at meager pay. Before long, he set off across America. Little is known about how he passed the next eight years. He sent a Christmas card from Cleveland to a relative in1905; the following year he sent a long letter telling about the San Francisco earthquake to a newspaper back in Sweden. He is said to have held many jobs during that time: on merchant ships, as a longshoreman, a logger, a miner, a fruit picker. He was a hard worker and a wanderer. By 1910 he had changed his name to Joseph Hillstrom.

In about 1909 when he was working on the docks in San Pedro, California, he encountered the radical labor union, Industrial Workers of the World - or Wobblies - formed in Chicago a few years earlier. He had become cynical about America as “the land of opportunity” because he worked at thankless, low paying jobs. So he joined the Wobblies enthusiastically. Their “One Big Union” aimed to include every working man, woman and child in the country and take profits from the rich for the workers who had produced them. A year or so later when he wrote to the IWW’s Industrial Worker, he identified himself as Joe Hill, member of the Portland, Oregon IWW. From that time on wherever the Wobblies were, Joe Hill was also. He became a legend with songs denouncing the bosses and scabs and praising workers in the “One Big Union.” Often he was reported in several places at once: in 1911 he was on the border between Mexico and the United States determined to help the Mexicans overthrow the corrupt Porfirio Diaz government; in Fresno he was beaten by police for union activity; and in San Pedro he served thirty days on a charge of vagrancy (cover, he said, for his work with the longshoremen).

No one is quite sure why he traveled to Utah in the summer of 1913. Some say he was on his way to the Chicago IWW headquarters to meet with Big Bill Haywood, a famous Wobbly organizer. Perhaps short of funds, he stopped long enough to work in the Park City silver mines.

On the night of January 10th, 1914 two men entered a grocery store outside Salt Lake City owned by former policeman John Morrison who, with his son, was just closing up. Both men were killed, but not before the young Morrison had shot one of the gunmen. The police concluded that Morrison had been killed in an act of vengeance: no money had been taken from the register and Morrison’s younger son (who had been in the rear of the store) said he heard one of the intruders shout, “We’ve got you now!” That same evening Joseph Hillstrom appeared at the offices of Dr. Frank McHugh with a bullet in his chest. Hillstrom told the doctor he’d been wounded in an argument over a woman. Later, when McHugh heard about the Morrison killings he reported having treated Hillstrom for a gunshot wound. When Hillstrom was discovered to be the radical labor activist Joe Hill, the state dropped the theory of revenge and called it a robbery gone bad. Hill refused to testify in his own defense, was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Many historians and activists believe Joe Hill was railroaded. By settling on him the state accomplished the double purpose of “solving” the murder and of ridding the world of a very effective labor activist. As Hill put it later in an article for a socialist journal: “... I never killed Morrison and I do not know a thing about it. He was ... killed by some enemy for ... revenge. Owing to the prominence of Mr. Morrison, there had to be a ‘[scape]goat’ and the undersigned being ... a friendless tramp, a Swede and, worst of all, an IWW, had no right to live anyway, and was therefore duly selected to be ‘the [scape]goat.’”

His case sparked a massive outpouring of support from the IWW: rallies were held throughout the nation, petitions poured in pleading pardon for Hill. The Swedish ambassador asked then-President Woodrow Wilson to intervene on Hill’s behalf and Wilson asked Utah Governor William Spry to delay so the case could be reviewed. Spry asked the ambassador and Hill if either had anything new to offer. The ambassador had nothing and Hill maintained his silence, saying only that he had not received a fair trial. In one of his last messages to Haywood, Hill said only, “ Goodbye, Bill. I will die a true-blue rebel. Don’t waste time mourning. Organize.”

Joe Hill was shot to death by the state of Utah on the morning of November 19th, 1915.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Justice Matters.